Movie Reviews : ‘Summer Story’ Draws Heat From Its Ingenue

“A Summer Story” (selected theaters) has been adapted from one of the most delicate and poignant of John Galsworthy’s short stories, “The Apple Tree.” Its screenwriter is the fine novelist-journalist-screenwriter, Penelope Mortimer.

The director is Piers Haggard, who also did Stephen Potter’s “Pennies From Heaven,” those dark and breathtakingly original English television plays. It’s clear from these that he is a man of impeccable style and enormous flair; and like Mortimer, he is familiar with the British countryside.

So, in heaven’s name, what has gummed up the works? What has turned this passionate turn-of-the-century love story of class and betrayal into the postcard-pretty, well-mannered porridge that it is?

It isn’t exactly the casting: James Wilby is pretty bloodless. Far less affecting than he is in “A Handful of Dust,” Wilby’s poetic Londoner, Ashton, is not a tower of strength either. But, after “Maurice,” Wilby holds the current patent on roles of introspective upper-class torment.

Imogen Stubbs’s Megan, the radiant “wildflower,” is too fragile a piece of porcelain to imagine doing hard farm work, but she’s a magical screen presence. With her thick brows and lashes, her bright blue eyes and her intrinsic candor, she could raise the protective instincts of “Snow White’s” Wicked Queen.

But she’s not a rough, stubby-fingered, darkly passionate country girl. Closest in casting is Ken Colley, who plays Megan’s country lover, Jim, with depth as well as strength.

But did Penelope Mortimer really write this “torn between fear and longing” voice-over that opens the film, bringing Ashton and his wife (Sophie Ward) back to Devon 20 years later? It hardly seems possible. It sets a mucilaginous tone to what should be minor-key tragedy; the sharp differences of class and privilege have been sandpapered down into bucolic quaintness and banality.

It’s a city boy-meets-West Country-girl story, a quickly smoldering love affair that leaves Ashton so enamored of his gentle young Megan that he plans to run away with her back to London, and devil take the differences between them. But they exist. Galsworthy’s Megan falls asleep over poetry; she has rough hands, a faded skirt and a fatally deferential manner toward “the gentry.” She would have had an impossible time of it in Ashton’s London; the street would have become her final refuge.

But not even condescending Londoners could have resisted Stubbs’ Megan, who is canny when she is not educated. There is a tenacity to her that makes you want to see her survive--somehow. (It’s one of the story’s great ironies; she has more vitality than Ashton. Marriage between them might have strengthened his line.) But she’s been made into a Laura Ashley heroine, not a Galsworthy one. (The film’s PG-13 rating is for some extremely decorous nudity.)

Director Haggard does get as much suspense as he can out of the scenes in Torquay, as Ashton--who’s come hiking without extra cash--has to cope with bank bureaucracy to get their running-away money. And it’s funny to see that banking fussiness has changed not a whit in more than 60 years.

But who has tampered with Galsworthy’s great country-Ophelia ending? They’ve ended here with an act of God, not an act of pure, melancholy desperation, very different things. This ending brackets the story too perfectly, exactly the way the perfect photography heightens the perfect landscape, or frames it with a perfect stone bridge or a perfect holly hedge.

You might never have believed how quickly perfection can become cloying.--SHEILA BENSON

‘A SUMMER STORY’

An Atlantic Entertainment Group and ITC Entertainment Group presentation. Producer Danton Rissner. Director Piers Haggard. Screenplay Penelope Mortimer based on “The Apple Tree” by John Galsworthy. Camera Kenneth MacMillan. Production design Leo Austin. Costumes Jenny Beavan. Music Georges Delerue. Editor Ralph Sheldon. With Imogen Stubbs, James Wilby, Kenny Colley, Sophie Ward, Susannah York.

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).