Days of the Bagnold Summer review: a charmingly relatable take on our cancelled summer holidays
Dir: Simon Bird; Starring: Monica Dolan, Earl Cave, Rob Brydon, Tamsin Greig, Nathanael Saleh, Alice Lowe. 12 cert, 86 min
Days of the Bagnold Summer begins with a cancelled holiday – we all know that feeling. Daniel (Earl Cave, son of Nick) is a teenage metalhead who’s meant to be spending the summer in Florida with his dad and stepmum. They’re expecting a baby, and abruptly change their minds about hosting him just before he’s due to fly.
The call comes through to his singleton mum Sue (Monica Dolan), who tries to break the news as kindly as possible that he’s stuck with her and an ailing dog for six weeks in the suburbs. It does not go down well. In all the ways that Daniel is surly, withdrawn and down in the dumps, Sue is chipper and glass-half-full, with a perky attitude that drives him crazy. She works in a local library and dresses almost uniformly in soft shades of pink: the film’s first visual gag is the pair of clotheslines in their garden, pitting her pastelly wardrobe of blouses and cardigans against his unbroken array of black T-shirts and jeans.
This film started life as a 2012 graphic novel by Joff Winterhart, which was plucked up by Inbetweeners star Simon Bird as the opportunity for his low-budget directing debut. Straightforwardly adapted by his wife, Lisa Owens, it gets a helping hand from the supporting cast – Rob Brydon, Tamsin Grieg, Alice Lowe – and from Belle and Sebastian, who supply a dozen or so original songs running the gamut from wistful to faintly twee. Bird hews closely to the recent templates for these things – the provincial dog-days-of-summer vibe often recalls Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, whose star Craig Roberts went on in turn to make an unassuming behind-the-camera debut with 2015’s Just Jim.
The overall sense of familiarity isn’t unwelcome – the film slips down brightly, doesn’t try too hard, and has a kind of jobbing warmth. Brydon’s sketch of an oily history teacher who asks Sue on a dinner date exists on the same plane as Greig’s New Age-y fellow mum, as sitcommy staples who raise a few smiles. In his acting debut, Cave grows on you: Daniel’s such an angry refusenik it takes an hour for him to find any modulation in the performance, but when things turn a corner he starts to seem like a natural. The script handles his depression as a genuine subject without being too pushy with the diagnosis.
The real ace up Bird’s sleeve is a near-perfect Dolan. Not only knowing Sue inside out, she stays firmly on her side, a best friend to the character who knows exactly how to inspire the same protective feelings in an audience. Her timidity is captured in a thousand tiny ways – just listen to the way she leaves Brydon’s character an answerphone message, so tense with getting the right friendly tone that she reads his own phone number back to him by mistake.
Sue has her limits, but her version of flying off the handle is so ineffectual it’s charming, and only once – in a chakra healing session with Greig’s character – does she have to collapse into sobbing self-pity, a moment Bird’s direction can’t quite sell as either real or hilarious. Dolan’s gift for observing the ordinary and making it sympathetic is like dialled-down Mike Leigh at the most recognisable end of the scale. It makes this character sing. Sometimes it just takes one actor to elevate a film from innocuous, take-it-or-leave it fare into something winningly tender – and if your first film’s needing that kind of lift-off, you could hardly do much better than Monica Dolan.
Available from 8 June on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Sky Store, Virgin, BT, Curzon Home Cinema and BFI Player
