Summer of love...

In SUMMER'04, Miriam, a German woman, mid to late 30's, is married to a loving badminton-playing scholar, and she is on vacation by the lake with her husband, her glum 15-year-old son, and his 12-year-old Lolita-like girlfriend Livia who thinks it's ok to have sex with lots of different people. One day, while her son and his girlfriend are at the lake, they encounter a 30-something German-American man (Bill), who, enchanted by Livia takes command of the sailboat, sends her son packing and spends the entire day out on the lake with the 12-year-old. Livia is clearly drawn to this man, and next day goes off to his house and doesn't come back? What to do?

Go to his house, fall in love with him and have a torrid affair with him of course.

What begins as a seemingly interesting representation of rational, mature German family behavior quickly disintegrates with the entrance of the American stranger, but it's really not that the newcomer possesses such mysterious powers, but that the veneer of maturity and rationality was completely flimsy and false to begin with. Miriam becomes obsessed with her extramarital affair with Bill, and when Bill tries to break it off because he is earnestly in love with Livia (the adolescent girl), Miriam swears to never allow him to see her again. An accident on the sailboat leaves Livia with a nasty bump on the head and by the time they reach shore, Livia is dead. Miriam leaves her husband for Bill, the scholar father takes his frustration out on his son -- the father-son duo both emasculated, impotent and pathetic.

What is this movie about, really? Not sure, it was kind of an absurd soap opera about two unlikely romances and the destruction of relationships by very selfish people. It's difficult to watch an outrageous human drama when you don't care much about the protagonists.