Writer: Robert Jones, after Tove Jansson
Director: Charlie McDowell
How do you film a novel in which nothing much happens? This is the challenge Charlie McDowell encountered when embarking on his version of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, a very different beast to a Moomin. Based on her own summers on the Finnish archipelago, Jansson’s book comprises vignettes discussing the nature of the island and how the small family of daughter, father and grandmother grieve the death of the girl’s mother. McDowell is faithful enough to the source material but brings more drama to the story.
As the book is set in the 1970s, McDowell shoots on film rather than digital, and there are no swooping drones to provide grand views of the island. This approach – and everything seems a little darker on analogue, and the choppy seas are more alive than ever – adds a sense of quiet grandeur to the slow life of the family.
Sophia’s father channels his grief into his work as an illustrator while the grandmother seeks time alone on the island, where she has spent many summers before. This leaves Sophia on her own with no one to talk to, following her grandmother around the island like a lost puppy. Neither father nor grandmother will discuss the dead mother. That the mother is not to be mentioned is signalled early on in the film when the grandmother hides the mother’s hat, abandoned the year before, in a wardrobe.
Instead, the memory of Sophia’s mother is implied by the poplar tree that the father tries to grow on the coast that takes the brunt of forceful winds and in the flowers that Sophia and her grandmother plant near the tree. A future is possible after all, their blooms gently proclaim. Otherwise, life goes on uneventfully. The arrival of a cat and, later, new neighbours are the only changes to the routine of long days and the occasional storm.
This is slow cinema, to be sure, but McDowell’s vision eventually draws in the viewer, and he is helped in no small way by Hania Rani’s beautifully melancholic score, ebbing and flowing like the tide that encroaches on the boulders outside the wooden house in which the family live. The acting of the three main cast members also contributes to the hypnotic power of the film.
Newcomer Emily Matthews is a revelation as young Sophia, who has the promise of wildness behind her obedient veneer. Anders Danielsen Lie is the father whose grief turns him into a shadowy presence, while Glenn Close, in layers of prosthetic wrinkles, is the sage old grandmother who slips into her own reverie of nostalgia. As befitting for such a star, the narrative of this version of The Summer Book increasingly follows the grandmother as she treks naked in the forest or attempts to find some peace, lying down in an old tent. Just a slight grimace on Close’s face tells us the frustration that the grandmother feels when Sophia is again at her heels. In a flash, the irritation vanishes, and the grandmother returns to her grandmotherly duties.
It’s not entirely clear why Close is the only one with a Scandinavian accent, and perhaps the end is a little too overt, but it makes perfect sense in a film with a strange magnetic spell.
The Summer Book is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
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Hypnotic Island life
