Summertime Love

 Summertime Love 

Last year I watched an Italian Netflix series titled Summertime, and this year I am re-watching it and anticipating the second season which has already been made available but I wanted to review the first season.  It is ineffable.  I usually look in vain for a sensitive, vibrant, human-friendly series, but whoever did this one scored near the top of my list.  It is simple, the plot almost no-plot, and I call it often, while watching, "Chekhovian."  "It's Chekhovian!" I will say aloud to the screen and would say it to the creators if I could.   

The young people in it are just having their summer, in an Italian beach town, and there are no fancy plot twists or weird special effects or dystopian brooding.  "This is it," says Chekhov in his stories, "this is what happened, make of it what you will."  So it is with Summertime.  No one gets killed, no one plots to kill or capture, there is none of that disgusting sadism in which TV too often plunges.  Just these kids experiencing their summer.  They are almost-adult.  That is a special time when vulnerabilities are exposed, but the glories hidden behind the vulnerabilities as well.  

I delectate on the setting, the lush sea-coast town, the beach scenes, the palpable feel of Mediterranean summer, as if I am breathing that very air.  The highs and lows of the young people are inextricably involved with their sex lives, or lack of them, as one might expect, and this is presented so naturally that one feels one is a friend to whom they are opening their hearts, rather than a voyeur.  Perhaps that is because so often they talk with one another about one another's romantic travails.  This has a refreshingly friendly feel, as if they were almost as concerned about each other's affairs of the heart as their own.

As an astrologer, I cannot help relating all this to the current planetary positions.  That's what astrology is for.  Venus has just moved to a 10-degree conjunction with Mars in Leo often the sign of romantic love, and they are both opposite Saturn in Aquarius a sign of friendship.  This is both promising and dire.  Dire because Venus conjunct, square, or opposite Saturn is the 'nobody loves me' aspect, indicating a time in which love has to get deeper if it is going to survive the disappointments it always seems to include more intensely at those times.  

I am re-watching the series through that filter, and it is a good one.  It makes love more poignant.  One of the lovers tells a friend that his affair is 'just a summer fling' and though that does not seem to bother him, beneath the statement is that sense of fatalism:  'Don't kid yourself, this is not going to last, it's just a summer fling.'  That is a defense against Saturnian disappointment, Venus saying boldly 'I can handle the end of this when it comes.'  

Yes, it's poignant, and each of the characters experiences the poignance in a different way.  And I?  I am letting the series waft over me and do its magic of pulling up memories of 'lost loves' for me to deal with however I may.  I feel this as highly therapeutic.  The creators of this series are excellent psychologists whose insights are so profound that they seem almost concealed, which makes them more effective.  They are linking me with the human world of young Italians in a way which sheds deep light on my own love-life, or would-be love-life, past and present.  

Venus's cogent answer to Saturn seems to be:  "Bring it on; do what you will to challenge my love, because you can't change the fact that I love."  

H H H  /  Cosmic Piper