Summer Lover

Saying that Summer Lover is like a bad soap opera would be an insult to bad soap operas.

Summer Lover takes place in the 1920’s. It follows newlywed couple Sappho and Phil on their honeymoon to an island in Greece. Sappho is rebellious and spoiled. Phil is blander than a saltine. While on the island, Sappho meets a woman named Helen. Helen introduces Sappho to the poetry of the original Sappho which awakens something in our protagonist. Sappho then becomes increasingly sexual and sexually dominant with Phil. She also negotiates a polyamorous relationship between herself, Phil and Helen. Unfortunately, too much jealousy and bad character work make this trio’s relationship end in tragedy and a return to heterosexuality.

Here’s a brief list of things I liked about Sappho. The lighting, the set design and the location scouting. The sets that the movie features are nice to look at and they’ve found some beautiful natural locations. Good job to everybody who was involved in those respective departments. They are the only ones who displayed competence in this movie.

Everything else about this movie is fully incompetent. I hardly know where to start. We’ll begin with the fact that the dialogue is dubbed. The movie is Ukrainian but I can find no evidence that there is a version without English dubbing. Dubbing is distracting and bad. I’ll allow it in films from the 1970’s because, well, those films are old. But in a movie from 2008? It was the wrong choice. Just let your characters speak their natural language and subtitle it.

But it’s not the dubbing’s fault that this movie had a terrible script. For one thing, there’s no character consistency. Sappho goes from jealous to supportive back to jealous for no reason. Helen says she loves Sappho frequently but when Sappho says she love Helen, this causes Helen to say love between women is wrong. There’s no consistent characterization let alone insight into its characters. Characters just say or do things so this movie can keep being the melodramatic piece of shit that it is.

Visually, it’s also pretty bad. While the settings on their own look pretty nice, Summer Lover is incredibly poorly shot. It’s shot mostly hand held. As a result, the visuals are shaky and it has problems with focus. The camera does tend to move around a lot instead of staying static which just draws attention to how very hand-held the camera work is.

There’s also zero visual storytelling. I’m not even sure if the director knows that what is. This does tie back into the bad script. Characters will just blatantly say what they want or how they feel in long sentences. There’s no attempt to convey this information through less blatant dialogue, visual cues or acting. Summer Lover clearly never heard of the writing rule of, “show don’t tell.” It shows us absolutely nothing.

Sappho is one of the worst protagonists I’ve seen in a WLW movie. I’m not saying you can’t have an unlikable protagonist but there’s a way to do it and this is not it. I hated every second this character (our main character) was onscreen. Sappho is spoiled, jealous and shallow. The movie does nothing to explore why this is or develop her as a character. The writer doesn’t seem to like this character nor is he interested or sympathetic towards her. That’s not great for a protagonist.

Summer Lover claims to be inspired by the writings of Sappho. However, I doubt the writer actually read them. Sappho is a historical lesbian icon and I believe she was largely regarded as such by 2008. So please don’t make a movie where your character named Sappho who believes herself a reincarnation of the original Sappho is not a lesbian. Sappho in this movie is a lot of things but she is not a lesbian. Sexuality-wise, Sappho seems to be bisexual and polysexual. She is certainly attracted to men. Also, Sappho talks often of wishing she were a boy which makes her come off as maybe trans. Though admittedly, I don’t think this is intentional. The writer probably just doesn’t know how lesbians work.

As a final insult to the original Sappho, Summer Lover ends with Sappho killing herself and Helen and Phil together. A dead queer woman named Sappho and a heterosexual endgame relationship. Just like Sappho would’ve wanted, I’m sure.

To round out, here’s a bunch of small ways Summer Lover is bad. It takes place in the 1920’s but the hair/makeup/styling is all very much the 1920’s by way of 2008. The movie doesn’t understand how tattoos work. There’s a scene early on where Sappho pretty much rapes her husband. They never bring it up again. It does that trope of Helen showing Sappho (who she just met) the place she goes to be alone. That trope tires me. Also, the place in question is a notable historical place where Sappho allegedly killed herself. Because if you want to be alone, why wouldn’t you go to a place of historical significance on an island meant to attract tourists?

The only way I could recommend this movie is if you were curious to see what Call Me By Your Name would look like if it were incompetent. Summer Lover is thematically, visually and story-wise somewhat similar. However, Call Me By Your Name is great and Summer Lover terrible. Admittedly, it’s sometimes delightfully terrible but not often enough that I can even call it so bad it’s good. Summer Lover is just bad. Very bad.

Overall rating: 2.6/10

Other WLW films in similar genre