Too tame to truly seduce
A risque subject gets the kid glove treatment in a drama that’s. . .
Summerland (Cinemas nationwide, 12A)
Verdict: Sunday afternoon fodder
Life With Music (Digital platforms, 12)
Verdict: Sensitive charmer
THERE is a certain kind of earnest but bland storytelling that always reminds me of those Sunday afternoon serials I watched as a child, just before spaghetti hoops on thick buttery toast in front of The Golden Shot.
Summerland fits that template perfectly. There is a same-sex relationship at the heart of the story, so it could never have unfolded over four afternoons in 1973.
But it could now, especially as the homosexuality is addressed so coyly that for a while you wonder whether they are lovers at all.
Summerland, a cinematic debut for playwright and theatre director Jessica Swale, is intended for a family audience, hence the restraint. Even so, for a film set in wartime which addresses some mighty themes, including death, bereavement and loneliness, it feels as if it has been dusted clean of grit just a little too thoroughly.
We begin in 1975, with Penelope Wilton. She is a bad-tempered writer with wild hair tied back by a scarf that doesn’t quite have ‘lesbian’ stitched on it but might as well.
Moments later we are back in the same house on the Kent coast, during the Second World War. Gemma Arterton is the same woman, Alice Lamb, 30-something years younger but just as irascible. She especially hates children, it is quickly made clear with the kind of subtlety you might recall from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
So when she is forced — ‘we all have to do our bit, Miss Lamb’ — to house a London evacuee called Frank (Lucas Bond), whose mother works for ‘the ministry’ and whose father is a pilot, Alice is none too happy. She is a reclusive academic, studying pagan myths (the preChristians referred to their notion of an afterlife as ‘summerland’, hence the title), and can hardly contain her fury that a child interloper might distract her from her scholarship.
ONLY contain it she does, as Frank’s Enid Blyton wholesomeness begins to win her round. Moreover, his presence sends her drifting into wistful softfocus reveries about the last person she shared her life with, a beauty called Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who eventually left because Alice couldn’t give her what she desired even more than Alice, namely children.
Could that be why Alice hates the little blighters so? Whatever, it’s a great relief to find her thawing. Arterton is a lovely actress but she’s nobody’s idea — except Swale’s, evidently — of a misanthropic hermit, terrorised by local scallywags who call her ‘a witch’. Tom Courtenay, by contrast, is everybody’s idea of the story’s kindly, bumbling headmaster.
However, the narrative strains credulity in several other ways. While lesbianism is handled with kid gloves, Vera’s colour and that of a few more minor characters isn’t handled at all. Race simply isn’t an issue in this filtered vision of Thirties and Forties England.
Even war rears its ugly head only when it suits the plot. Alice lives within sight of the white cliffs of Dover, yet not a single Messerschmitt or even Spitfire overhead ever interrupts the idyll.
Despite all these idiosyncrasies, Summerland
deserves to find an appreciative audience. It has a faint echo of The Railway Children, which is never a bad thing. And I’m always happy to be reminded of spaghetti hoops on toast on Sunday afternoons.
LIFE WITH MUSIC is another film for a Sunday afternoon, an intelligent, sensitive charmer gently powered by Patrick Stewart, who is perfectly cast as a brilliant, world-famous concert pianist called Sir Henry Cole. Sir Henry is making a comeback in New York after being knocked sideways off his piano stool by the sudden death of his wife.
Following several years out of the limelight, his gifts are unsullied but his emotional f ragility becomes manifest as stage fright.
His long-time agent (Giancarlo Esposito) cannot really help him but the New Yorker’s winsome classical music critic Helen Morrison (Katie Holmes) can.
Sir Henry grants her an interview and gradually their friendship turns into a romance, which, given the 38-year age gap between Stewart and Holmes, might send you running from the room.
But actually it has been deftly done and is rather sweet.