Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Helena Ganjalyan, Bartosz Szpak
Starring: Magdalena Fejdasz-Hanczewska, Helena Ganjalyan, Daniela Komędera,
Weronika Humaj
Films as disparate as M. Night Shyamalan's The Village and
Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth have adopted the premise of people
being gaslit into staying within the confines of a particular setting that
promises safety from outside threats. With their feature debut,
Glorious Summer, writer/directors Helena Ganjalyan and Bartosz Szpak offer another variation on
this theme. Their film skews more towards Lanthimos than Shyamalan, but it
lacks the satirical edge of the Greek Weird Wave and as a result its very
serious take on what is now a well worn premise has little to say that
hasn't already been covered.
Glorious Summer is set in an alternate reality Poland where
it's always summer. Three women - credited only as H (Ganjalyan), M
(Magdalena Fejdasz) and D (Daniela Komedera) - live an initially idyllic seeming existence.
Like Dua Lipa, they appear to be on a permanent vacation, residing in an
abandoned Renaissance palace of the sort that dots Central Europe. Their
needs are catered for, with fresh food, drink and clothes delivered by
some ambiguous presence through a room that resembles a storage unit. The
women don't have to work for their keep, but they're expected to read "The
Book of Glorious Summer," a tome that is updated each summer, with new
words added and others removed. They must listen to piped-in wellness
messages of the sort Maureen from HR might display on posters in her
office. They take part in word association games and at the end of the day
must tell some unseen observer what made their day "glorious."
Having your needs catered to is all well and good, but what about your
wants? That's where things begin to break down in this utopia. The three
women have secretly grown tired of their pampered existence and have
hatched a plan to break free. Glorious Summer plays like an
arthouse riff on The Great Escape as we observe the women
practice their escape plan, which involves faking their deaths. The movie
opens with a striking shot of a limp Komedera playing dead, keeping her
eyes open for an impressive amount of time as the camera zooms in, a shot
that recalls Janet Leigh lying lifeless on the bathroom floor after being
butchered by Norman Bates in
Psycho.
We come to realise that the slightly older H and M have been here longer
than D, who isn't yet quite as tired of her surroundings. The older women
have developed a secret "touch language," that allows them to communicate
ideas without being heard by D or any Big Brother type eavesdropper.
Glorious Summer might have proved more intriguing had it
arrived a couple of decades ago, during the heyday of Big Brother and its
various reality TV clones. Now its message regarding personal freedom is
old hat, as is its mystery box narrative of "what's beyond the horizon?",
a format that reached its peak with the 2000s TV series Lost. In our current moment with immigration being the core issue that
divides us politically, the question of whether it's worth risking leaving
our sanctuary and facing potential outside dangers has been replaced with
a debate over whether we should risk allowing strangers into our
world.
While its narrative and ideas fail to stimulate, the same can't be said
for Glorious Summer's visuals. It truly lives up to its name in this regard. Ganjalyan and Szpak draw influence from European arthouse masters like
Antonioni, Tarkovsky and Bergman in how they frame their human subjects
against their centuries old backdrop. Cinematography, costume and
production design are meticulously synced to create striking images, all
captured on 16mm film that crackles with grainy life. It's a reminder of
just how great European cinema looked in the pre-digital era, and clever
use is made of the setting's architecture, constructed in a time before
electricity and now allowing for creative compositions by 21st century
filmmakers. But for a film that warns of the dangers of settling for
superficial comforts, it's awkwardly ironic that it's the visuals rather
than the story and its themes that will linger in the mind after basking
in Glorious Summer.
