Summerland marks the feature debut of writer-director Jessica Swale, a woman with an impressive CV of stage work and the hilarious viral video Leading Lady Parts in 2018. Its chocolate-box imagery may make this World War II drama look like a familiar soft-centred brand of British heritage film, but there’s more substance, and subversion, here than meets the eye.
Naturally, Swale has given Gemma Arterton (who produced and starred in Leading Lady Parts) a plum role here. She plays Alice Lamb, a loner living in a coastal cottage surrounded by a village of gossips, whose solitude is shattered by the arrival of boisterous London evacuee Frank (Lucas Bond). Lamb is a grade-A grump, who snarls at the local children — although admittedly this is in response to them stuffing twigs in her letterbox and accusing her of being a spy.
She is a professional killjoy, too, whose vocation is refuting nonsense: she’s a scientist who researches the natural explanations for mythical phenomena, such as the “floating islands” glimpsed off the coast. They’re a trick of the light, she argues. And don’t get her started on religion.
Both gorgeous to look and immaculately played.
Alice and Frank begin to rub along together (did you expect anything less?) as she begins to explain her research to him, and even relents to his pestering for chips. He even seems to guess what happened to her in the past, revealed in flashbacks to the 1920s when she loved and lost someone special. We know, though he doesn’t, that her name was Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, whose quiet delivery of the word “presumably” is unexpectedly devastating), and life was never going to be easy for the two young lovers.
Arterton turns in a massively impressive performance as Alice, just as vulnerable as she is spiky, as does Bond. Their chemistry is striking throughout. The supporting cast includes a note-perfect Tom Courtenay as the local schoolteacher, a sweary Penelope Wilton as an older version of Alice, and young Dixie Egerickx as Edie, a sour-faced tomboy classmate of Frank’s and a future Alice if ever there was one: “I’m a maverick,” she announces, quite delightfully.
The film is both gorgeous to look and immaculately played, with stunning, sun-drenched coastal scenery and DP Laurie Rose’s beautiful, telling camerawork framed through windows and half-open doors, and over shoulders — Summerland is a little shy of revealing all of its secrets at once. It’s so lovely-looking, in fact, that it would be terribly twee without a dose of Alice’s acerbic tongue every so often. This is a film about parenting and compassion, but it’s also keen to show how female independence has been punished throughout the ages — whether the victim is painted as a witch, a siren or a Nazi spy. It’s just a shame that the plot tumbles into an awkwardly contrived coincidence and from that point on, it gives into some movie magic that will be far too sentimental for many tastes.
