There’s too much going on here. While I find it somewhat fascinating that a story this simple can touch on so many different topics, that fascination turns into gawking rather quickly at how, by some bizarre anti-miracle, none of it ends up fitting together in a satisfying way.
Summerland is the story of shut-in writer Alice (Gemma Arterton) who, during the London Blitz, is made to house an evacuee (Lucas Bond as Frank). Given how she is introduced with a near-literal taking of candy from a child, you can see why she isn’t thrilled about all this. It sets itself up as Alice learning to open up a bit more and be less of a colossal bitch (seriously, I know she’s meant to be on a learning path, but they laid it on way too thick right off the bat) by warming up to her ward. And in the midst of that, we have Alice researching old folk legends and their scientific origins, coming to terms with the effects of her past relationship to flapper Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and dealing with the general superstition in town that she is actually a witch or possibly a spy for the Axis.
To a certain degree, notions of prejudice and social estrangement run through a lot of the aforementioned layers, showing folklore as a historically misogynistic practice in depicting non-conforming women as wicked and/or sinful, something that lingers in how Alice is treated. There’s definitely something to be said about the dynamic between her and the rest of the townsfolk, as that kind of prejudice can easily lead to a chicken-and-egg scenario where you end up losing track of who is reacting to whose assumptions. Hell, even beyond her misanthropy, Alice’s mannerisms as a writer are… more relatable than they should be. I mean, speaking as someone who spends a lot of time on his word processor, with plenty of noisy kids in the same household, getting distracted/interrupted while you’re in that authorial zone does suck, so it creates an unlikely connection point in-between the weird character progression.
But even with that from the off, and Arterton doing her best with the character she’s given, there’s still the issue of how it doesn’t come together in a way that does each thread justice. The contemporaneous queer angst, the folklore history, the war-time attitude of everyone doing their part, the emotional distance, even the characters in their own right; it’s less a cohesive meal and more like someone raided the buffet table, worrying more about physically balancing everything on a single plate than any of the flavours working together. The act of watching this involved sitting through what should have been some pretty heavy moments, but because the film’s breezy tone and pacing are so prevalent, they were snuffed out long before they could make the right impact.
It’s an attempt at tear-jerking that only manages to jerk the audience’s entire bodies around, with an array of different tones and even writing styles within a singular text that never manage to bridge the gap between each other. Writer/director Jessica Swale’s feature debut certainly comes across like it has quite a bit to say, but it needed refinement and a better flexibility of mood to truly shine, as I feel like I should’ve been a lot more into this film than I ultimately was. She might make something a bit tighter somewhere down the line, but where this one is concerned, it’s yet another debut that is more trial run than self-encapsulated entertainment.
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