Writers: Greta Bellamacina and Jaclyn Bethany
Director: Jaclyn Bethany
The awkward revival of a childhood friendship and the hen weekend reunion between Jo and Scarlet at a country house is the substance of Greta Bellamacina and Jaclyn Bethany’s new film Tell That to the Winter Sea which arrives in cinemas this week. Staged around a series of very earnest duologues between the now grown-up women ahead of others arriving when the film finally gets going, these awkward encounters ring a hollow note, filled with unlikely and heavily loaded conversation that neither woman or the audience is keen to resolve.
Cutting between the intense teenage relationship between Jo (Greta Bellamacina) and Scarlet (Amber Anderson) who met during dance class in their seaside town school – although neither actor convinces as teenager – Tell That to the Winter Sea is keen to establish the profound nature of the connection between the central women and the hint of betrayal or denial of some truer feelings that Jo in particular is keen to avoid given her impending marriage to the perfect-sounding but absent John.
There is also a residual bitterness about how their respective lives have turned out, Scarlet especially resenting both the end of their relationship and Jo’s apparent career success as a performer based on some transgression that set them on different paths. The conversation is a little unnatural in most scenarios, never quite reflecting the excitement of friends coming together or the ways that individuals would naturally interact with one another, too much of the dialogue filled with a confessional solemnity that lacks substance.
While this should be a tender romance, the film feels too one-sided from the start, Jo has moved on and moved away from her teenage emotions while Scarlet is clinging to a dream of first love from 15-years before. It makes the adult Scarlet’s needy looks and intensity seem a overly predatory and, ultimately, unsympathetic. That may not be the balance that Bellamacia and Bethany are aiming for but it frustrates the film dynamic and any empathy for Scarlet’s plight.
The rest of the characters are poorly drawn, a group of former friends who barely seem to have seen each other in years yet five of them gather at Jo’s country cottage to relive the old times, but they all have to be Jo and Scarlet’s old times to facilitate their story rather than creating any sense of the adult lives both women have lived with its accumulation of friends, relationships and other substance, as though they must always be defined by a fleeting romance half a life time ago with nothing happening to them in between.
Tell That To The Winter Sea will be in Select UK Cinemas from 31st May, TVOD / EST from 1st July and PVD & SVOD from 29th July.