Inauspicious British period dramas like Summerland are a dime a dozen. Usually set between the dawn of the twentieth century and the 1960s (and often during the Second World War), one comes by about every year that is in style and tone not unlike something you might encounter on a BBC affiliate or PBS on a Saturday night. These films like Their Finest, The Bookshop, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society generally skew older in terms of their target audience, with feel-good narratives, simple conflicts, and an abundance of pretty or nostalgic scenery designed to show off serene England particularly for non-English viewers -Summerland is set on the coast of Kent so there’s plenty of that. But while these movies are of a particular type, that doesn’t mean they can’t be good within those boundaries.
I’m not convinced Summerland is, but it makes a valiant effort, the debut film of Olivier award winning playwright Jessica Swale (who’d previously worked with both her lead actresses on the play Nell Gwynn). Though structured like a biopic, the film is a fiction about a reclusive writer and folklorist in the 1940s who reluctantly takes in a London evacuee boy. Over the course of getting to know the kid and introducing him to her passion and perspective on the world, she becomes a surrogate mother to him. Gemma Arterton plays this part, Alice Lamb, and plays it aptly, surprisingly adept as a cantankerous woman in her forties well used to being the village scapegoat. She carries herself with an air of the utmost confidence and certainty in her esoteric beliefs that of course belies her insecurities and the spectre of her past.
That past being an illicit affair glimpsed in minuscule flashback episodes she had during the inter-war years with Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Vera that came to a heartbreaking end some years prior. Alice has been carrying the wounds of this lost love ever since. The scenes expounding on this are probably the films’ strongest, utilizing its’ two best actresses well and injecting a refreshing bit of queerness (albeit notably chaste) into an otherwise rather conservative-oriented film. The significance of seeing this relationship plays into the films’ final act, but before then it works to adequately humanize the at-times deliberately off-putting Alice.
The title comes from the name of a pagan interpretation of the afterlife called “the Summerland”, illustrated in the film through a mirage-like optical illusion of an island in the sky. Alice’s expertise in ancient European mythology and new Pagan beliefs underlines a lot of her character development with Frank (Lucas Bond), though his subsequent interest comes off as more than a little disingenuous. I’m not sure whether he’s genuinely meant to be compelled by this stuff. He does seem to Christian-ize it a tad by the end as an equivalent counterpart to heaven.
Frank is one of the films’ poorest executed components. Bond does fine for what he’s got, but the character never breaks free of his dismal war orphan type. I also get the sense he was written as a younger boy than he was cast, at one point making more of a fuss over a scraped knee than is necessarily appropriate for a kid seemingly pushing fourteen. He only ever warrants interest in the vicinity of better characters like Alice or his joyful yet idiosyncratically nihilistic playmate Edie (Dixie Egerickx).
There’s a major twist related to his character, which though perhaps not explicitly foreshadowed is very much an “it figures” kind of plot turn than something truly astonishing. Following up the standard outed liar device (a not at all inventive variation I’d add), it suggests a lot more potential than this movie could possibly live up to. Summerland is not the kind of movie equipped to really investigate the level of drama brought about by its twist to any meaningful end. How the movie ultimately handles it therefore doesn’t strike me as disappointing, just expectedly mediocre. This is a film that doesn’t have a lot on its mind after all, or at least nothing particularly noteworthy. The off-screen death of Frank’s father halfway through seems to suggest the film is making a statement about loss or grief or the importance of surrogate families or even faith. But whatever it is saying, isn’t conveyed with enough force or conviction to remain with its audience within ten minutes of leaving the theatre.
The movie is fixed with a framing device that is useless, featuring Penelope Wilton (the third-billed star) as an older Alice in the 1970s. She appears only briefly at the beginning and end in a sustained continuity that is narratively confused with the film proper: she’s grumpy and mean to teenagers at the start to reflect her younger selfs’ initial attitude, but then is suddenly seen to be warm and kindly at the end as we’re told she eventually became -within the span of presumably a few short hours.
Tom Courtenay is the other veteran appearing in the film, alongside other recognizable faces of the British screen industry, Amanda Lawrence and the great Siân Phillips -though they’re often little more than set dressing. They like their quaint environment are there to sell an old-world British quaintness. It is what Summerland is best at. Laurie Rose, the regular cinematographer for Ben Wheatley, manages some very pretty imagery (one particular scene at dusk of Alice’s cabin overlooking the cliffs struck me), and some glistening moments of halcyon abandon in those flashbacks. Summerland is nice and very British and occasionally engaging, but like witnessing that mystic plane, it produces only a fleeting pleasure.
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