the summer book…

Moira and I escaped the heat and disappeared to the cool of the Watershed cinema to see Charlie McDowell’s adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 book ‘The Summer Book’.
An elderly artist, her recently-widowed son and her 6-year-old granddaughter (Sophia) while away a summer together on a tiny island off the gulf of Finland.
The bulk of the film, like the book, is an account of the relationship between the old, cantankerous, cigarette-smoking woman (rather delightfully played by Glenn Close) and her grandchild… Frequently funny and full of candid, sometimes argumentative, conversations between them. The location is beautiful and their simple, isolated, summer lifestyle enviable. Nothing much actually happens but, in many ways, that’s the film’s charm.
Fundamentally, it’s a film which conveys thoughts about passing time, memory, wisdom, loss and nature and, like the book, I really enjoyed it.
PS: I first read this book more than 50 years ago and re-read again it last year (Jansson – who died in 2001, aged 86 – spent several summers living on the island). Jansson wrote the book a year after her mother’s death and she drew on the things that were most precious to her.  When I re-read the book last year, I was struck by the fact that, when I first read it, I wasn’t a grandparent… and now there are 6 grandchildren – three of them are adults!).