Days of the Bag­nold Summer

This is a win­ning fea­ture debut from actor Simon Bird, best known as the short spec­cy one from UK TV sit­com The In-Between­ers. He mar­shals the gen­tle com­ic cur­rents of a wist­ful Eng­lish sum­mer break in which divorced moth­er and depressed son are thrown togeth­er, offer­ing a vast range of excru­ci­at­ing char­ac­ter details but lit­tle in the way of a sat­is­fy­ing sto­ry arc.

We mean­der in at the point in which per­ma-glum wannabe hair-met­tler Daniel (Earl Cave) and his divorced, fuss­bud­get moth­er Sue (Mon­i­ca Dolan) are shoe shop­ping ahead of a wed­ding – the expe­ri­ence proves to be pre­dictably futile and awkward.

Mono­syl­lab­ic Daniel is able to raise a small trace of a half smile at the prospect of vis­it­ing his Flash Har­ry father in Flori­da to meet his new wife and even dri­ve in his new sports car. Yet his unre­li­able pops blows him out, sen­tenc­ing him to a sum­mer of search­ing for jobs, eat­ing bread, walk­ing the dog, lis­ten­ing to Metal­li­ca and clap­ping-back at his mother’s soft­ly-spo­ken requests for basic civility.

The film is based on a 2012 graph­ic nov­el by Joff Win­ter­hart, and Bird’s way with com­po­si­tion and chore­og­ra­phy cer­tain­ly retains the bold sim­plic­i­ty of that pri­mal mode of visu­al sto­ry­telling. Cave and Dolan both com­mit ful­ly to their char­ac­ters, and moments of bit­ter, inci­sive humour often derive from the sheer banal­i­ty of their inter­ac­tions, such as Sue let­ting Daniel know he can have a beer when they’re eat­ing out, or offer­ing to make him a sand­wich as her key ges­ture of mate­r­i­al love.

Some of the more overt­ly sit­com-ish side char­ac­ters, such as Tim Key’s gob­by fudge mak­er or Rob Brydon’s school teacher lothario, push the com­e­dy of humil­i­a­tion a lit­tle too far, and the sense of dis­com­fort (that being shy is the butt of an easy joke) often feels a tad con­trived. All the base ele­ments are there, but the rea­son this one falls short of great­ness is down to a dis­ap­point­ing and pre­dictable final act that is more like a des­per­ate reach for a hap­py end­ing than an hon­est out­come to this fraught situation.

The film’s moral – that depres­sion is super­fi­cial and there are easy fix­es for any emo­tion­al strain – is pat and under­de­vel­oped, an attempt to swift­ly round out the mate­r­i­al rather than offer a con­vinc­ing rea­son as to why it was worth spend­ing time in the com­pa­ny of these characters.