Summer Memory

Out of It understands the unique agonies of metropolitan adolescence. The reluctant hero of the piece, Paul (Barry Gordon), is a shy, bright kid trying to get through a particularly difficult mid-teen summer on Long Island. His parents have enough money, he gets to use the car and the speedboat, but he is still vaguely dissatisfied. The root of his trouble is hardly unique: girls. To him they seem frivolous yet desirable, brainless but captivating. They all appear to share one dominating characteristic: inaccessibility.

All of them, trim in tight bathing suits, seem more interested in the beefcake varsity football squad than in Paul, who spends a good deal of his time reading The Myth of Sisyphus and contemplating the infinite sorrow of existence. A crush on a sexy cheerleader named Christine (Lada Edmund Jr.) gets him into trouble with the gum-snapping football star (Jon Voight) and makes him, if not entirely a man, at least more than a boy.

Filming a familiar tale that appears to be heavily autobiographical, Writer-Director Paul Williams, 25, pays the requisite homage to Truffaut and Welles, not to mention The Graduate and Goodbye, Columbus. The warmth and wit, however, are completely his own. He roots the action firmly in time and place ("Long Island, 1960"), and from the vantage point of a new decade it seems a long and innocent time away. But Williams makes the frustrations of young love agonizingly familiar, the ache of awakening sexuality vivid and true. For pure eroticism, a scene in a beach shower between Paul and Christine, clad in bathing suits and washing each other's backs, is worth a dozen of Antonioni's desert orgies.

Williams displays a disciplined, unaffected style that, like the early work of John Huston, complements but never dominates the narrative. Barry Gordon, as Paul, is alternately manic and melancholy with equal finesse, and Jon Voight (who made Out of It before Midnight Cowboy) gives the football hero just the right touch of caricature. Out of It lacks the dazzle of The Graduate, but more than compensates with its own air of personal testimony.

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