99 min | PG | July 31, 2020 | IFC Films
A reclusive writer on the wartime Kent coast gets saddled with an evacuee boy and a heart she would rather keep frozen. The folklore she studies turns out to be the grief she has buried. The coastline does more work than the screenplay.
Alice Lamb is a writer who lives alone on the cliffs of Kent during the Blitz. She studies folklore and the science of mirages. The village children call her a witch and she does nothing to correct them. Then the war hands her Frank, a boy evacuated from London to her doorstep. Summerland sets out to thaw a frozen woman, and it is really about grief and the stories we build to survive it. Jessica Swale wants the myths Alice studies to mirror the life she has buried.
Gemma Arterton plays Alice with a brittle hostility that is the best thing in the film. Alice is rude and exact and uninterested in being liked, and Arterton commits to that without softening it for the audience. Lucas Bond plays Frank, the evacuee, with an open sweetness the script leans on too hard. Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Vera, the woman Alice loved before the war, in flashbacks that carry what warmth the film has. Penelope Wilton plays the older Alice in a framing device built mostly to signal where the story is heading. Tom Courtenay plays the schoolteacher Mr. Sullivan with a gentleness that asks for nothing.
Jessica Swale directs her first feature from her own script. She shoots the Kent coast in postcard light, all golden fields and gleaming chalk cliffs and a sea that never looks like a threat. That softness is the problem. The setting is a country under German bombs and the camera keeps photographing a holiday. The score swells on cue to tell you when to feel, and it arrives long before the scenes earn it. The flashback structure drains the tension by promising a reunion the plot then has to engineer.
The screenplay sets up real stakes and then refuses to honor them. A love lost to war, a child who could be taken away, a woman walled off from everyone around her. Swale resolves each thread with a coincidence so tidy it deflates the grief that came before. The interesting version of this film sits with loss and lets it stay unresolved. This one reaches for the consoling ending and finds it too easily. Arterton’s hard, unsentimental performance deserves a story with the nerve to match it.