BFI Girl Summer: the new online trend that everyone is talking about

Ever since I was a child, I have dreamed of inventing an online micro-trend. So it was with envy and bitter resentment that I watched my colleague Serena coin “hot rodent boyfriend”, only for it to become the talk of the town, setting ablaze both social media and the pages of the Guardian, the New York Times, and even USA Today. Decades from now, long after the Euros, Brat and the election of Keir Starmer have faded into irrelevance, historians will look back on this period as the summer of the Hot Rodent Boyfriend. I wanted that for myself: the acclaim, the celebrity, the millions of pounds in royalties and, above all, a shot at immortality.

I took out a notebook and started racking my brains. Even though I am a boy (or rather an adult man), I thought I’d have better luck by including “girl” in the name of my micro-trend. I had recently been eating a lot of nectarines… what about “Nectarine Girl Summer”? That wasn’t bad  – nectarines are superior, in my opinion, to their vastly overrated cousin, the peach – but there wasn’t quite enough to bite into. Earlier in the month, I had sustained a moderately severe head injury after being run over by a truck, and then saw that Princess Anne had been hospitalised with the same condition… Could “Concussion Girl Summer” have the juice? That was more promising – it had the unmistakable ring of virality – but other than myself and the good princess, I couldn’t think of a third celebrity who had been concussed, and couldn’t therefore claim it was a trend. At last it struck me, with a sense of inspiration so powerful it was like being hit by a truck all over again, but this time in a good way: BFI Girl Summer! 

For those of you who have been living under a rock, allow me to break it down for you: BFI Girl Summer is about watching the kinds of films that play at the BFI, whether at its cinema in London or its online screening platform: Ingmar Bergman, Reiner Fassbinder, Akira Kurasawa, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujirō Ozu and the rest of the gang. (If you are American, you can substitute it for ‘Criterion Girl Summer’ and keep the same meaning.) It doesn’t matter where you watch these films, but there are some parameters: Martin Scorcese, through his tireless promotion of world cinema, embodies the spirit of BFI Girl Summer like no one else, but watching Casino or Goodfellas wouldn’t count. It’s about watching the films which make the ‘best of all time’ lists chosen by acclaimed directors rather than the readers of Empire magazine – with all due respect to The Dark Knight. And just because I invented the trend five minutes ago for cynical reasons, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.

The reason I began to have a BFI Girl Summer is because I was housebound for a month – but it’s hard to extrapolate a wider trend from my own specific circumstances. However I do think – or at least I could pretend to think for the sake of justifying the trend’s existence – there is something larger at play. Say what you like about Barbie and Oppenheimer, but their dual release last year was a bonafide occasion; there was a sense that pop culture history was being made before our eyes. Because I am a hater by disposition, I probably grumbled about all the ‘Barbieheimer’ memes at the time, but looking back, I didn’t know how good we had it. The cinema landscape this summer has been starkly different, bringing with it flop after flop – no one is going to look back in 20 years and recall the time they saw The Fall Guy. It’s true that a handful of films have captured the cultural zeitgeist – Challengers and I Saw the TV Glow among them – but no blockbuster has even come close. When the offerings of mainstream Hollywood feel so uninspiring, why wouldn’t people reject it and look elsewhere? To the distant past? To foreign lands? To the BFI?

BFI Girl Summer is about forcing yourself to improve your own tastes, and then realising that your reasons for doing so were beside the point all along. Being a BFI Girl doesn’t come naturally to me: my tastes are thrill-seeking verging on basic (more John Carpenter than Jean-Luc Godard), I don’t have much attention span for anything that could be described as “difficult” and my skills as a film critic are limited to saying “wow, that actress is sooooo pretty!” But as my BFI Girl Summer progressed, I began to find that I was genuinely enjoying these films, not just enjoying the idea of myself as someone who would – they were not improving, important or “good” in some abstract sense, but captivating, scary, beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking. To name a couple of highlights: Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a melodrama about an elderly German woman who falls in love with a Moroccan migrant decades her junior, moved me to tears more effectively and profoundly than a Netflix rom-com ever could, and Bergman’s Persona – as well as being innovative, experimental and intellectually ambitious – was as gripping as a psychological thriller. It turned out, to my surprise, that all of these films are critically acclaimed for a reason: they’re really good.

The true spirit of BFI Girl Summer is doing it for its own sake, and not for whatever cultural capital you think it might help you accrue. No one is going to check you are doing your homework or, past a certain age, consider you “precocious” for having watched Andrei Rublev, so you might as well give up on all that. The “film bro” has become an unfairly maligned figure in recent years, but BFI Girl Summer stands in opposition to his most unflattering caricature: it’s not about showing off or sneering at the tastes of others, but approaching – with an open heart – a limitlessly vast and exciting world of cinema.

That’s how I understand it anyway, but I do not own BFI Girl Summer – it is my legacy; my gift to the world. Take it and do with it what you like; embrace it, reject it, redefine it, and please, please, please, write an opinion column denouncing it as elitist. Come on guys, let’s get this trending!!!