"The Summer House"
                        A film review by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister
                      on "The Women's Show"
                    WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL
                        February 6, 1994

  I don't think it's a coincidence that some of our local male
film critics who are positively orgasmic over this week's
Chinsegut Film Festival featuring "Films of the New Violence"
have been utterly contemptuous and dismissive of "The Summer
House," a British import now playing at the Tampa Theater and the
Movies at Pinellas Park.  There are some films that feature older
women characters--especially those that address the subject of male/
female relations--that some of my male colleagues seem consistently to
undervalue while mature female audiences thoroughly enjoy them:
"Shirley Valentine,"  "She-devil," and now "The Summer House."
(It was the discrepancy between what I saw and what I read about
"Shirley Valentine" that made me so mad I started writing my own
movie reviews a few years back.)

   "The Summer House" was directed by Waris Hussein, produced by
Norma Heyman and is from the 1987 book "The Clothes in the
Wardrobe" by British novelist Alice Thomas Ellis.  It is about a
young woman, Margaret (Lena Headley), who has returned to her
mother's staid suburban London home from an obviously traumatic
visit with family friends in Egypt (though the source of the
trauma is revealed only gradually in flashbacks).  Depressed and
confused, she has allowed herself to become engaged to the man
next door whom she really can't stand, a silly jerk in his '40s
who lives with his widowed mother (Joan Plowright).   Margaret's
mother Monica (Julie Walters) is an utterly conventional middle-
class English woman, for whom marriage was less than wonderful
and who is long divorced, but who pushes her daughter, nonetheless,
(and without very much success) to act and feel the way patriarchal
society decrees brides-to-be are supposed to.  As the wedding day
approaches, Monica's best friend, Lily (Jeanne Moreau) whom she has
known since they were schoolgirls together in colonial Egypt, arrives.
Lily is the antithesis of Monica's conventionality.  She is a
totally free spirit and her own person.  She was a ballerina in her
youth. Now she's in a very free and unpossessive marriage to Robert,
an artist, and she loves and lives as she pleases. She and the groom's
mother Mrs. Monro are wary of one another for they both know that
years ago Lily had had a romantic fling with Mr. Monro.  But Lily
goes to visit Mrs. Monro one day with a bottle of Scotch and they
clear the air.  For the main thing about Mrs. Monro's otherwise
enjoyable widowhood is that besides her pug she has no one to
talk to, at least no one who understands what she's saying. Lily
understands--specifically she understands that Margaret must not
throw her life away marrying a twit she doesn't love just because
people expect it of her.  Even though the twit in question is her son,
Mrs. Monro agrees.  How everything gets worked out is one of those
movie secrets about which people who have seen it are sworn to secrecy.
But it's a great surprise.

    The thing that makes this film so wonderful for women (and so
off-putting to some men) is that it is filled from beginning to
end with women's discourse, by which I don't just mean that women
are doing the talking, but that they are articulating a female
world view, in particular the world view of crones like Lily and Mrs.
Monro who have lived long and learned a lot about life and who no
longer bother to play by patriarchy's rules--they have earned the
right to say and do what they really think--about life, men, and
marriage.  And they do so with such warmth, charm, and wit, it's
delightful--and very funny.  I was laughing out loud a lot.

   So this weekend while some of the boys are out playing pirate
at Tampa's annual Gasparilla pirate invasion, and others are
getting off on hyperviolence in the movies, the women of Tampa may
want to get themselves to the "The Summer House" and take a young
woman with you.  It's our best revenge.

   For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister
on Women and Film.

   Copyright 1994 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the
author.