Director – Charlie McDowell – 2024 – UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland – Cert. PG – 90m
*****
A young girl spends the Summer on a small island with her grandmother – adaptation of Tove Jansson’s novel is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 7th
Young Sophia (Emily Matthews) wanders around the short, rocky coastline. Elsewhere, her grandmother (Glenn Close) uses her walking stick to tap loose pieces of moss into place on the huge boulder on which she stands. The young girl’s father (Anders Danielsen Lie from Bergman Island, Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021; The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021; 22 July, Paul Greengrass, 2018) has planted an apple tree in the hope that it will thrive on the island.
Tove Jansson’s novel is, to all intents and purposes, a series of short stories about the girl and her gran on the island over a summer. That makes it a tough job to adapt into a feature without making it feel episodic, but screenwriter Robert Jones has captured its essence admirably. What you get is the story of their relationship with lots of beautifully observed details about life on the island thrown in.
Sophia is like any child; curious about the world around her. Her grandmother, a wise old bird, is a source of wisdom. She seems to know exactly how to deal with the youngster. She takes her to a lighthouse on anther island and happily lets the girl explore the light knowing that she won’t either come to any harm or do any damage. When on another occasion the fed up girl makes repeated use of the swear word “bloody”, grandmother asks her why she’s using it (“it sounds good”) without suggesting she shouldn’t use it. The word disappears fro the girl’s vocabulary.
Her father is often busy working (he is an illustrator and has some publisher’s commissions to complete) so most of the film is spent in the company of the young girl and / or the older woman. At one point, Sophia drops him a written note through the roof telling him she hates him; on another, she watches him from a small hole above as he works on the finicky details of a picture, seemingly in admiration.
The family is suffering from the recent loss of Sophia’s mother, and although that loss is never foregrounded, it’s there throughout the film and clearly has had a very deep effect on Sophia’s father. Equally prevalent is the knowledge, certainly of the two older adults, that grandmother probably hasn’t got much longer to live. Mortality and frailty are everywhere, and yet the characters here not only get on with the job of living, but of doing so and embracing everything life has to offer.
Jones’ adaptation provides the perfect vehicle for director McDowell to explore the inner worlds of both Sophia and, to a lesser extend, her grandmother. Newcomer Matthews proves deeply affecting as Sophia. Veteran actress Close is a revelation. Both characters are played as ordinary and down to earth, yet somehow infected with the downbeat, magical nature of the place in which they find themselves.
The novel is very definitely a book for grown ups, yet somehow the film, which manages to achieve a similar lightness of touch to Jansson’s writing, while it definitely plays to grown up sensibilities, could well captivate some children on the grounds of Matthews’ engaging performance and the feelings of a child’s world.
In short, the experience of watching the film is very different to that of reading Jansson’s book, and yet the team behind the film have somehow captured the young girl, the grandmother, and the island about which the author wrote. Altogether, a remarkable adaptation and achievement.
The Summer Book is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 7th.
Trailer: