Bourgeois, But No Bore

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It has all the elements of a cozy little domestic comedy: a young woman depressed by her impending marriage to a perfect twit; her mother tensely determined that the bourgeois niceties of the occasion will be punctiliously observed; his mother glumly sorry to inflict her son on anyone; and descending on them a worldly and eccentric woman -- Auntie Mame with a foreign accent -- eager to disrupt the ritual politesse of English suburban life.

But The Summer House isn't really a funny movie, though it is often wry, sometimes wise and generally genial. It is, more than anything, a rather sober meditation on life's tendency to disappoint. "I had hoped to die young," says Lili (Jeanne Moreau), "but now it's too late." Scarves aflutter, jewelry ajangle, her hair aflame with henna, she has just breezed in from Egypt and a past everyone once shared along the Nile. She copes by constant movement, outrageous talk and copious quantities of alcohol and tobacco. Monica (Julie Walters), the divorced mother of the bride, is all domestic bustle, dark thoughts held at bay by her many tasks -- remaking her awful old wedding dress for her daughter, considering the canapes for the reception. Mrs. Monro (Joan Plowright), the mother of the groom, sleeps a lot, awakening to express in a rumbly purr her dismay with just about everything.

These are all wonderful performances, in which rue and survivors' courage are gently voiced, with nobody trying to steal a scene or, heaven forfend, the picture. Moreau is particularly fine, since her role is one that could so easily be domineering.

The film's terribly still center is Margaret (Lena Headey, who was the maid in The Remains of the Day). She has recently been out to Egypt on a visit and, like so many travelers from her country, felt the heat of an exotic climate warm the dampness of her English soul, experiencing both emotional trauma and the hint of a religious vocation. This, together with the braying fatuity of her fiance, has placed her in a conflict that renders her almost mute. She would like to be a dutiful daughter, but the effort is -- quietly, of course -- costing her her sanity.

You can couch this dilemma wittily, as screenwriter Martin Sherman does, but you can't really evade its darker implications. Director Waris Hussein doesn't try. His style is objective without being cool or repressed in the all-too- common English manner. He avoids playing for big laughs the mostly awful social situations in which his characters find themselves. Even a drunk scene between Plowright and Moreau is low-keyed. It is very agreeable to discover a movie in which everything is not foreshadowed, underlined, commented upon. In other words, The Summer House is disciplined in the way that British theatrical productions often are. As a result, the story's somewhat surprising conclusion actually surprises.

But it doesn't quite take your breath away. That's the downside of disciplined filmmaking. Even though the movie is quarried out of a substantial fictional trilogy by Alice Thomas Ellis, it plays more as anecdote than as a fully developed narrative. It feels somehow ephemeral -- a glancing blow, not quite a knockout. Still, emotional acuity, expressed with brisk intelligence, is not a common movie commodity, and it ought to be valued when you come across it.