Three Summers ★1/2
Imagine, if you can, an elderly white man, Michael Caton, stretching his arms wide and performing an Indigenous dance as part of a traditional welcome at a summer, country-town folk festival, before delivering a sermon on the virtues of acceptance and multiculturalism to a smiling, nodding, ethnically diverse circle of music lovers.
The saddest thing about this scene, from writer-director Ben Elton’s new romantic comedy, Three Summers, is that it is not played for irony. The film contains not a smudge of the shadowy humour that made Elton’s early sitcom Blackadder such an iconic and subversive part of Britain’s Thatcher-era cultural landscape. Rather, Three Summers is an ensemble comedy set across three consecutive instalments of ‘Westival’, a hippy enclave to which thousands of summer holidayers escape every year. It’s here that Queenie the community radio host (Magda Szubanzksi in sharp comedic form) narrates the events. There is a misfit romance between sassy fiddle-player Keevey (Home and Away’s Rebecca Breeds) and folk-shunning theremin devotee Roland; Keevey’s dad Eamon (John Waters), who is battling with his alcoholism at AA; a family struggling to absorb adoptee Baktash (Mahesh Jadu), just out of a detention centre; and grouchy Henry (Michael Caton), who glare across the campsite at a bunch of Indigenous kids, including Jack (Kelton Pell).
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Comments (3)
I'm not afraid to write that I liked it. The acting was exquisite. More so if the film was as bad as every one else seems to think. It was, on the surface a very simple storyline with heavy topics portrayed lightly. Maybe in an effort to ensure brainless cinema goers would get it. Maybe I've just outed myself as brainless! I can't be bothered restating the plot but I feel Ben Elton probably was trying to attempt to portray aussie issues within a film where he only had one and a half hours to do so. Or otherwise the editing was manic. Maybe both.
My main question is; were all those cultures depicted asked to give input into the story which described them? If they were and they are happy, I'm happy.