Stream It Or Skip It: ‘An Unforgettable Year – Summer’ on Prime Video, A Coming of Age Romance Set at Carnaval

An Unforgettable Year – Summer, is the first of four Brazilian movies produced for Amazon based on a YA book of the same name. The book featured four short stories written by four different Brazilian authors, and Summer was written by Thalita Rebouças. Her story of summer love set during Carnaval is a predictable romance that’s about 30 minutes longer than it needs to be, but if you like happy endings, this film is filled with them.

AN UNFORGETTABLE YEAR – SUMMER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Rio de Janeiro in all its glory. As we see a montage of the city’s greatest sights, the camera lands on Queilinha (Patricia Ramos), a singer dressed in her Carnaval finest, singing an ode to Portela, one of the city’s famed samba schools. The camera pans out and we see that we’ve been watching a music video promoting Carnaval.

The Gist: Inha Torres (Livia Inhudes) lives with her family in a small town called Mirantinho in Brazil: that includes her brother Tavinho (Diego Martins), father Otavio, a conservative politician running for governor on a platform of family values, and her free-spirited grandmother (Regina Sampaio). An aspiring fashion student, Inha dreams of getting out of Brazil and studying in Paris, but she needs a recommendation from someone in the fashion world to get her in to school there. When she learns that a famous stylist named Carrie Goldenblat (Mariana Rios) – who is Brazilian, but now lives in L.A. – is in Rio, she heads there without her father’s knowledge, to seek her out, leaving her grandmother, who loves Carnaval but is too old to travel, behind.

Unaccustomed to the big city, especially during a busy, festive time like Carnaval, Inha hits a guy with her car as she drives into the city. The guy’s name is Guima (played by Micael), and though she’s concerned for him at first, she argues with him and drives off after he pokes fun at her for not being used to the chaos of Rio. When Inha goes to try and meet Carrie, who is helping design costumes for Carnaval, she runs into Guima again. He gets her a job sewing costumes for the parade, and while she is at first a fish out of water, she soon makes friends and ingratiates herself into the mix of seamstresses and performers for whom Carnaval is a way of life.

Eventually, Inha gets to meet Carrie and, well, she’s the definition of why you never want to meet your heroes. Carrie lets Inha design the parade costume for Queilinha, the woman in the music video at the beginning of the movie, who is a celebrity in the world of Carnaval. And then Carrie takes all the credit for the costume. Inha is disappointed but bounces back when Queilinha tells her that she knew Inha was the designer, not Carrie. (Queilinha is the hero of the whole movie: a kind celebrity who sees through fakes and mean people, and helps make everyone else’s dreams come true out of sheer kindness.)

Making matters more complicated, Guima and Inha start a romance, but Guima is keeping a secret: he and Carrie were a couple up until recently, and she still wants to be with him. When Carrie discovers Inha and Guima are together, she releases pictures of Guima and herself kissing, and makes a public announcement that they’re moving back to L.A. together. Essentially, she is vindictive and has trapped him in the relationship because she’s famous.

In the end, Inha’s grandmother ends up in the hospital, so Inha leaves Rio (and Guima) behind to go home before Carnaval is over. And she gets an idea: why not bring Carnaval to her small town? And so, she buses all of her new friends, the drummers and dressmakers and dancers, including Queilinha, who performs on top of a bus, to her town. Her father, the Carnaval-hating conservative threatens to shut it all down but softens at the last minute, Guima shows up to apologize, and everyone is happy. The end.

Our Take: If you’re not fluent in all things Carnaval, as I’m guessing many Americans aren’t, it might take a minute to understand some of what’s going on here. (I’m certainly no expert, but it’s my job to relay information like this, so I furiously Googled my way through the film to understand the differences between the samba schools that take part in the Carnaval parade, specifically the famous Portela school which is where Inha gets a job as a seamstress.)

While Inha begins the film having no real connection to Carnaval at all and only wanting to attend because her idol, Carrie, will be there and can help her get into her bougie fashion school in Paris, it becomes clear that Inha needed this Carnaval experience to get in touch with her roots and find herself and finally understands the celebration of it all. Honestly, there’s a little bit of a Sound of Music vibe to the film, in that her mother, who was once a Carnaval dancer, died when Inha was young, so her father basically removed all signs of it from the home, moved the family out of Rio to escape the memories of it. While Inha’s father doesn’t actually join in the dancing at the end, at least he acknowledges the importance of the festivities. It’s Edelweiss with a big dash of samba. Meanwhile, everyone else has their happy ending too: Inha’s brother Tavinho comes out of the closet, Grandma makes a recovery, and of course, Inha and Guima end up together. And it was all because of Carnaval.

Sex and Skin: Some kissing that leads to a tame, nudity-free sex scene, and a scene where a man tries to force himself of a young woman, but the situation gets shut down before anything happens.

Parting Shot: Inha, Guima, and the rest of the cast dance in the streets to celebrate Carnaval in her small town.

Sleeper Star: As Tavinho, Diego Martins is sweet as a closeted guy who comes out of his shell and realizes his true potential. He has a huge performance number during a parade where he manages to prove he’s a skilled dancer, while keeping his facial expressions incredulous and full of wonder, like he doesn’t belong.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I didn’t come here for a Carnaval romance, I came to work.”

Our Call: An Unforgettable Year – Summer is a classic coming-of-age romance with all the tropes you’re already familiar with: the beloved mentor becomes a villain, a girl with big dreams realizes that her real dream can be found closer to home, love is found in an unexpected situation, blah blah. It’s fine, just entirely predictable. My recommendation is unless you have a deeper connection to Carnaval culture, which is woven with love into every minute of the film, you can SKIP IT.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.