Shopping for food*

“I thought you'd be hungry, maybe.”

Schneider and Ronet's characters go get their groceries in a tiny, surprisingly well-stocked-with-Asian-food-items French corner shop, ánd manage to find all the ingredients needed. One rookie mistake: Uncle Ben's. Of all the rice in the world…

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

“Don't ask a dying man to lie his soul into Hell.”

– Lt. Sam Lubinsky

“Fantastic! You are a first class dilettante!”

– Kidlat's proud parents

“Grünes Licht für ehrgeizige, strebsame und arbeitswillige junge Menschen.”

Characters go on a date, or fall in love*

“It would be thrilling if you were willing, and if it can never be, pity me, for you were born to be kissed, I can’t resist, you are temptation, and I am yours!”

– Nacio Herb Brown & Arthur Freed, Temptation (1933)

On a beautiful summer day in Rimini, Carlo, the handsome son from a bourgeois home, saves a little girl and becomes infatuated with the girl's mother, a young widow years his senior. Set in July 1943, the events in the outer world (poss. spoilers) and the faith of the two uneven lovers slowly come to their logical conclusion.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

Someone's all bundled up*. No list of summer films is complete without Éric Rohmer.

“I even tried not to think. I was face-to-face alone with the sea, far from cruises and beaches, fulfilling a childhood dream put off year after year. I lost myself completely in the play of shadow and light, sinking into a lethargy heightened by the water. That state of passivity, of complete availability, promised to last much longer than the euphoria of one’s first summer dip into the ocean. I could easily see myself spending a whole month this summer this way.”

– Adrien

An art dealer and his writer friend plan to spend the summer together in a villa on the Côte d'Azur. A young woman, a collector of sorts, disrupts their retreat.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

“You knew who I was when I came here today. But you were surprised to see me alive, weren't you? But I'm not alive, Mrs. Philips. Sure, I can stand here and talk to you. I can breathe and I can move. But I'm not alive. Because I did take that poison, and nothing can save me.”

– Frank Bigelow

The Life Magazine displayed at the San Francisco newspaper stand where Frank Bigelow stops is the issue of September 12, 1949, with Yugoslavia's leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito on the cover.

 

Someone with sunburn, or a skin condition*

“I treasure some kinds of old Thai disaster movies. Many of such tell a forbidden love story between a man and a woman that the mother earth destroyed them. Similarly, Blissfully Yours contains innocent narrative and simple characters. The settings are open landscapes and the disaster plot is there, except that it is transformed into another kind of disaster.”

– A.W., via

Min and Roong cherish their love among the uncertainty of his residence status. A old woman guards them, and soothes Min's blistered skin.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.