Summerland, the newly streamable release from IFC Films and writer-director Jessica Swale, is many things at once: a World War II drama set amid the social upheaval of the Blitz, a meditation on parenthood and duty, a gently erotic lesbian romance, and a pagan rehashing of imagery most famously associated with Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. As a motion picture that presumably means to entertain, it is an abject failure, a cramped production in which the characters’ surnames might as well be Plot Device and Politics. As a cultural artifact portending the next phase of post-Christian moviemaking, on the other hand, it is worth at least a passing glance.
Starring the English “actorvist” Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace, #TimesUp), Summerland is the story of Alice Lamb, a misanthropic scholar who spends her days reading Norse mythology and chasing pranksters from her seaside cottage. When a London train arrives bearing Frank (Lucas Bond), one of a score of children sent to the countryside during the Battle of Britain, Alice must set aside her solitary life and make a home for her temporary ward. Joining the pair onscreen are Dixie Egerickx as Frank’s classmate and friend and Tom Courtenay as a wizened schoolmaster, neither of whom has much of a function beyond occasionally moving the action along. Lingering in Alice’s memory is the elegant Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a fellow writer with whom Alice once conducted a brief and ill-starred affair.
Despite the familiarity of its central plot (I await the film in which the protagonist doesn’t learn to love the moppet with whom fate unites her), Summerland might have worked as a minor wartime melodrama if only a few pitfalls had been dodged. As Alice, Arterton is suitably daft in a role that literally sees her plucking chocolate from the hands of a babe. (The stresses of rationing are apparently significant.) Effective, too, is Bond as the boy who eases his way into Alice’s heart, a process that owes much to the duo’s shared interest in “visions, witches, [and] that sort of thing.” Though the two actors do good work in their many scenes together, Summerland is nevertheless one of the stagiest and most cloistered movies in recent memory. An Olivier Award-winning playwright, Swale excels at crafting a tightly scripted exchange. What she neglects to do, disastrously, is to show the viewer anything that he or she would be unable to find in a West End theater, a failure of directorial imagination that reduces her film’s epic scale to a mere pencil point.
Certainly, Summerland is in need of a fuller sense of the world beyond its characters. Yet even in the realm of its domestic relationships, the movie frequently stumbles. It is inevitable, for example, that the rapport between Alice and Frank will grow as the plot advances. In Swale’s hands, however, the alteration in question is so swift that the matter feels not only preordained but perfunctory. The hurdle of their initial antipathy is far too easily cleared.
Similarly bungled is the attachment between Alice and Vera, which might have been a source of moral tension (the film is set in 1940) but is used instead as the means by which Swale applauds her audience’s preconceptions. Thus, while the picture’s erotic scenes are filmed with lyric subtlety — feet nestle beneath a summer sun; a kiss, framed just so, is obscured by a protruding shoulder — its romantic subplot is anachronistic and boring. The movie has few characters; all are meant to be liked; ergo, none dare defy 21st-century orthodoxies of opinion. Indeed, Summerland’s sexual politics are little more than a cudgel with which Swale batters absent conservatives. “Most people think [we’re] wicked,” Alice protests in a speech that wouldn’t have been out of place in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Obergefell v. Hodges opinion. “That it’s a sin to love someone. That we should burn in hell.”
Who among Summerland’s makers might have objected to this simplistic perspective? Not Arterton, who has spent much of her post-“Bond girl” career in pursuit of left-wing causes. (“I love going on marches,” she effused to the Guardian in 2018.) And not Swale herself, whose interviews reveal a predictable assortment of fashionable grievances. Consequently, what emerges in the absence of any dissenting voices is less art than propaganda. Though beautifully photographed and indisputably sincere, Summerland is an exercise in unrealism: an elegant rendering of a wholly imaginary social world.
Yet of all the film’s peculiarities, the most striking by far is its devotion to post-Christian spirituality, a characteristic on clearest display when Frank sees in the clouds a glimpse of the pagan afterlife from which the movie takes its name. As previously mentioned, the scene owes an obvious debt to Breaking the Waves, the heavenly church bells in which are among the most powerful Christian images in 20th-century cinema. Summerland, it should be noted, explicitly rejects the existence of God. (“Hokum, all of it,” Alice tells Frank.) That it simultaneously suggests that Frank can commune with the supernatural is intriguing indeed.
In his beloved masterpiece The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis predicted the emergence of the “Materialist Magician,” the man who worships “what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits.'” Such a person is surely to be feared, as what ethic or creed could possibly constrain him? In its small way, Summerland has taken us a step closer to his appearance.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
