If movies have taught us anything, it’s that a trip to a country house with friends will inevitably result in romantic complications. When the gathering includes menopausal ladies and hot-to-trot young wannabe studs, matters can get even stickier.
Unrelated, Joanna Hogg’s delicate award-winning drama, shot largely in static vignettes, follows forty-something Anna (Kathryn Worth) to the Tuscany summer home of former school friend Verena (Mary Roscoe) where a disparate group of upper middle class English types are holidaying and boozing under one luxurious roof. Anna’s sunbathing reading list (Dante?) and painful phone calls to her husband back home suggest serious marital difficulties. She finds comfort, though, in her friends’ gap year children, particularly Oakley (Tom Hiddleston), for whom Anna, sadly, makes a fool of herself. Arguments and mental meltdowns soon follow.
Composed of infinitesimal movements, Ms. Hogg’s screenplay will never use a minute of exposition where ten minutes of Altmanesque overlapping dialogue, noisy carousing, awkward silences and unspoken tensions will suffice. The film’s languid rhythms and obvious curtseys to such slow-burn masters as Ozu and Antonioni seem galaxies away from Hogg’s professional background in Eastenders and Casualty. But if the material lacks a cliffhanger on paper, within its own naturalistic framework, the short-lived freak-outs and bust-ups can pack a ‘Who Shot J.R.?’ punch.
Patient (very patient, mind) viewers will be rewarded with a poignant account of feeling past it, a seductively balmy cricket-song wild-track and a quietly optimistic coda. Well, they are all living it up in Tuscany, after all.