Summer Of Sangailé

Sangail� (Julija Steponaityte) is sullen, disaffected, a little aimless -- if she were a boy, you'd hardly look twice. But she's a 17-year-old girl, and her moods swing from buoyant (when she's watching stunts performed by a nearby aeronautics club, or gazing raptly at the stunt planes) to dejected (at which point she cuts her arms using the chart end of a drawing compass).

Then she meets Aust� (Aiste Dirziute), a waitress at a nearby cafe and an aspiring clothing designer. If Sangail� is a creature of the air -- with her love of flying things, and high places such as trees and rooftops -- Aust� is more a siren, a creature of the water and a bit of a seductress. Taking a fancy to Sangail� at first sight, Aust� makes it her mission to encourage Sangail� to pursue her dreams and take wing.

It's encouragement Sangail� misses at home, where her mother (Curate Sodyte) -- a former ballerina -- also dreams of a kind of flight: The leap on the stage that carries one into rapture. What little we see of her reinforces the perception that having a teenaged daughter to look after seems to her less like steadying ballast than an anchor dragging her down.

"Summer of Sangail�" might be seen as a metaphor for the way in which love pushes, coaxes, and forces you into territory you're reluctant to set foot on. It's a fitting metaphor, and the film effortlessly follows the necessary beats for the "first love" genre, including the panicky moment of rejection and the subsequent reconciliation, and -- not incidentally -- the jump to years later, when we can see just how the two girls have fulfilled one another's needs and in turn gone on to fulfill their own potential.

Coming from former Soviet nation Lithuania, where anti-gay hostility remains high, this seems a brave and defiant film -- but none of that sours the sweetness at its core.