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‘The Summer Book’ Review: Glenn Close Takes a Healing, Very Hygge Holiday
Starring Glenn Close and Anders Danielsen Lie, Charlie McDowell's film of Tove Jansson's 'The Summer Book' is high on comfort and low on incident.
Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel “ The Summer Book ” wasn’t a memoir, but it was a memory piece of sorts — its slender narrative of largely unspoken grief and healing imbued with, and enriched by, the author’s palpable feeling for its remote Gulf of Finland island setting, where she herself maintained a rustic holiday house. An unexpected departure from the cool genre workings of his previous features, most recently the Netflix neo-noir “Windfall,” McDowell’s film doesn’t always find the spiritual echo in such physical aspects that Jansson’s sneakily haunting book does: A new poplar tree planted amid the rocks, as a gesture of faith in the future, is as mawkishly demonstrative as things get. Indeed, “The Summer Book” is a film mostly besotted with the craggly pebble beaches, pine-needle carpets and stonewashed skies of its landscape, all exquisitely shot by the great Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (“Victoria,” “Another Round”) in compositions focused less on sweeping postcard perfection than the particular, tactile details of light and texture that come to color lifelong memories.
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