“It calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth… and there were valleys. And there were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in – you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies, and there was fresh air… and there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed enclosures blasted some millions of miles out in to space.”

– Freeman Lowell

Someone goes to a spa, beach, or retreat*

“There’s something almost poetic about finding a hairpin in the bath. It’s like the sole of my foot has been pierced by poetry.”

– Nanmura, via

Relaxing at an onsen, a young man steps on the titular kanzashi. Now injured with too much time on his hands, he and his fellow nosy patrons start speculating about its owner. Then a telegram announces her arrival.

 

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

Someone is in an ambulance or hospital*

“We still remember our high wall. Even the day we first climbed it, filled with curiosity. The sadness of the discoveries of those years seemed devastating to us. Then we wondered how we could have forgotten it so suddenly.”

– prologue

It's summer in Prague. Jitka, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, follows a stray cat and finds a tall hospital wall. Behind it, a young man in a wheelchair rests. The girl and the man connect.

 

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

Everything's expensive: someone is a at bank or ATM*

 

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

A character pigging out*

“The most revolting film I have ever seen”

– Mary Whitehouse, via

Four hedonistic gourmands throw a party of the flesh, of meat, of lust, and death.

 

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

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.

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 fate 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.

 

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.