This film has brevity going for it which is a definitely a plus when you make a social realist drama with little concession to ornamentation or ostentatious mise-en-scene.
Smits was a nice guy who said before the film started that even if the audience didn't like the film "we can still have a Q&A afterwards, and still be friends". Prior to this film he had been a documentary filmmaker, but I think he felt a little uncomfortable with that. He filmed in depressed areas and often his female subjects became quite... attached to him. So here he is making a fictional film with some of the types of characters he would previously have only observed, so this engagement is nice.
So we follow some pretty damned dysfunctional families, with haggard adults for whom alcohol is tops, skanky teens for whom fornication is tops, and kids for whom pranks are tops. And guys let no-one tell you that film is no education for during the festival, whilst researching Police, Adjective, I learnt that the rhetorical device in my previous sentence is called an epiphora! More education here, as in a real life classroom, a real life teacher (obviously they're all acting, but they're acting themselves), has Le Cancre (The Dunce), a poem by Jacques Prévert on his blackboard, which is damned beautiful. It's pretty much describing young tearaway Benjamin to a great extent, I'll just quote the last three lines for pleasure's sake:
"with chalk of every colour on the blackboard of misfortune he draws the face of happiness"
So you see a lot of mishap in this film, and some pretty disorganised living, that could be used as fuel for a lacerating Beckettian potshot regarding dulladry and lack of will to live, but Smits manages more warmth. I particularly enjoy Benjamin skipping school and feasting on a massive bar of white chocolate with milkshake, a folie du gourmand for sure, this combo, but you can see that youthful exuberance overcomes that.
Dad perhaps has hygiene problems and sleeps fairly roughly from time to time. I slept on a building site once for a week with no bathing or shower facilities or central heating and know roughly how he was feeling in the movie, sleeping in his clothes body bathing yourself using a sink. He's quite ingenious and manages to urinate in a container and use it as a water bottle.
Anyway you may be wondering what the title of the film is all about? Good question, "it's already summer" is a reference to Martijn's belief that the perspective of the unfortunates he runs into is the problem, they all think it's winter time and that their lives are useless, whereas actually they have a lot of free time, and good times, and just need to get on with each other a little better.