Sum­mer­land

This year has already deliv­ered one suc­cess­ful queer peri­od film, Céline Sciamma’s Cannes-win­ning Por­trait of a Lady on Fire, set in 1770 Brit­tany. Now we have anoth­er, from first-time British writer/​director Jes­si­ca Swale.

The sig­nif­i­cance of this phe­nom­e­non – of both con­struct­ing and decon­struct­ing how female-female rep­re­sen­ta­tion man­i­fests on-screen – goes beyond sim­ple view­er­ship, as it fills in the gap of the images that are lost between same-gen­der rela­tion­ships. This is the basis from which Sum­mer­land springs to life.

Iso­lat­ed in 1940s Kent, Alice Lamb (Gem­ma Arter­ton) is a cur­mud­geon­ly lon­er with a pen­chant for drown­ing her­self in her work; she is con­stant­ly shown hunched over a book in an attempt to escape from her trou­bled past. Her reserved dis­po­si­tion is shat­tered when a Lon­don evac­uee, a young boy named Frank (Toby Osmond), is forced upon her as a tem­po­rary res­i­dent while Lon­don is torn to shreds by Ger­man bombers dur­ing World War Two.

A quick turn­around from frus­tra­tion, of hav­ing to house an unwant­ed guest, to the adop­tion of mater­nal instinct ful­fils one half of the love sto­ry told in the film. This pla­ton­ic romance jux­ta­pos­es the heart­break of Alice’s past, one involv­ing a class­mate from uni­ver­si­ty named Vera (Gugu Mbat­ha-Raw). Mem­o­ries of their rela­tion­ship flood Alice’s thoughts as her time with Frank pro­gress­es, and the lines between the mul­ti­ple chronolo­gies begin to blur.

There is a seg­ment in the film in which Alice believes to have deduced the geog­ra­phy of the ​“float­ing clouds,” which are just opti­cal refrac­tions of images in the light. Frank, a ram­bunc­tious and curi­ous child, jumps up to his feet on the cliffs of Dover to point to a float­ing cas­tle with a green flag, but Alice auto­mat­i­cal­ly accus­es him of lying, as Dover cas­tle does not fly flags and she could not see any­thing herself.

She dri­ves to the loca­tion of the cas­tle to see that she was in fact wrong, and that Frank is indeed the only one out of the two of them to catch sight of the refrac­tion in the clouds. He then makes the con­nec­tion between this myth and the Pagan belief of Sum­mer­land – an invis­i­ble after­life among mor­tals, ​“all around us.”

Swale’s film is an enchant­i­ng bal­anc­ing act of the past, present, and future accord­ing to our pro­tag­o­nist. The major­i­ty of the sto­ry is told from Alice’s present, with occa­sion­al jump cuts to our present time, and her sor­did past. Each thread plays on dif­fer­ent famil­iar tropes from oth­er queer peri­od films, har­mon­is­ing to tell a dif­fer­ent sort of narrative.

The folk­lore unveiled in Alice’s aca­d­e­m­ic work is trans­lat­ed to the screen as she sets out with Frank to explore the sci­ence behind the mythol­o­gy of ​“the float­ing cas­tle” in the clouds, based on the inter­sec­tion of dif­fer­ent vol­umes of myths.

Arter­ton and Osmond make for an effec­tive pair­ing, car­ry­ing the sto­ry with high ener­gy from begin­ning to end. The two actors main­tain a tena­cious grip of the already vibrant script, allow­ing for a ten­der deliv­ery of humour, nos­tal­gia and melan­choly – though no sen­ti­ment here runs too deep.

The film is a sur­pris­ing gem that deliv­ers a light-heart­ed com­pro­mise between fairy tales and war sto­ries to posit that there could be a hap­py end­ing among the rubble.