In most years at this point in August, a streaming playlist of summer-set films would have a wistful quality to it: “This, in case you’ve forgotten after three months of tepid drizzle, is what summer theoretically feels like.” Three months into the balmiest British summer since Labour was in power, however, the heat oozing off the screen in a great summer film has a differently seductive effect, akin to eating sticky-ripe fruit in season: the film, however far-fetched or far-flung, becomes a sensory extension of yourself. Retreat to out-of-time Christmas classics if you’re that desperate to cool down; I prefer to commit fully to the summer madness in all its thick-aired glory.
In fact, for those inclined to fretfully fan themselves when the temperature creeps much north of 25 degrees, sinking into Kasi Lemmons’s wonderful Eve’s Bayou (1997, now streaming on Amazon Prime’s Starzplay’s channel) might be positively comforting. The film so languidly evokes the swampy, mangrove-tangled fug of high-summer Louisiana as to make our own heatwave seem brisk by comparison. Putting its climate-based pleasures aside, however, this entrancing blend of southern gothic atmosphere and Creole voodoo lore remains undervalued in the American coming-of-age canon. Its story of a 10-year-old girl stumbling into unsavoury family secrets over the course of one steamy summer plays as a knowing cross-cultural riff on To Kill a Mockingbird. With time, perhaps it’ll become half as ubiquitous.
Is The Sheltering Sky set in summer? I’m not sure I specifically recall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s fifty-shades-of-ochre adaptation of Paul Bowles’s novel takes place in a kind of endless, elastic heat haze. Its Sahara-bound story of a marriage in freefall fuses environment and emotion to a feverish degree. The film got an unjust critical trampling on its release in 1990, but its humid indulgences have aged well. The Observer’s Philip French was among the minority of critics to see method in its sunstruck madness at the time, and the jarring tension between its woozy sensual rapture and cutting psychological desolation has found a greater cinephile following over the years. Mubi is currently showcasing it as part of a mini-tribute to the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose score here is a thing of dreamy wonder.
If you’re seeking closer-to-home summer comforts, Bank Holiday is about as quintessentially English a portrait of the mad season as you could wish for. Made in 1938 by Carol Reed, it’s a chipper, chatty diversion, darting between a host of Londoners descending on the sands of fictitious seaside town Bexborough one roasting August bank holiday. Something of a Brexit nostalgist’s summer fantasy, then, but don’t hold that against its gently melodramatic charms.
The main romantic throughline involving a holidaying nurse and dashing widower (the hyper-winsome Margaret Lockwood and John Lodge – sadly no relation to yours truly) is as nourishing as a 99 flake. The preserved-in-aspic fascination of the location shooting and class politics are the real draw here. It’s surprisingly difficult to source, either on DVD or the usual streaming outlets. Hats off to the quaint but frequently useful public-domain collection Free Classic Movies, which has download options.
Finally, for more substantially swoony summer loving, it doesn’t get better than Summertime, David Lean’s eternally ravishing, heart-lifting 1955 study of an intense Venetian fling between Katharine Hepburn’s buttoned-up school secretary and Rossano Brazzi’s suave, pomade-scented antiques dealer. The most iridescent of all screen valentines to a city not short of them, it’s a reverie of Murano glass hues and saturated gardenia fragrance. I’ve sung its praises in a previous seasonal feature, but with Filmstruck having added the film to its growing roster, I couldn’t resist the chance to do so again. Pour yourself an Aperol, switch the fan on, and gorge.
New to streaming & DVD this week
A Quiet Place (Paramount, 15)
John Krasinski’s low-budget, high-concept horror sleeper (right) remains a cracking surprise even on the small screen. Don’t scrutinise the wobbly premise too closely, and submit to its twig-snapping tension.
My Friend Dahmer (Altitude, 15)
An unusual, unexpectedly sensitive addition to the serial-killer subgenre, probing Jeffrey Dahmer’s formative teen years with plain human curiosity rather than lurid fascination.
Thoroughbreds (Universal, 15)
Cory Finley’s auspicious debut feature – a sinister cross-class comedy of very bad manners concerning two warped prep-school girls – is almost too coolly poised for its own good, but it’s savagely effective when it remembers to breathe.
Bagdad Cafe (Studiocanal, 12)
A welcome Blu-ray restoration for one of the most beguiling arthouse curiosities of the 1980s: a European-accented pit stop in the Mojave desert that sits halfway between Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch in oddball sensibility.
