Wow! Such a good movie.

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Anna (Kathryn Worth) is having marital problems and spending the summer holiday family friends Verena (Mary Roscoe), Charlie (Michael Hadley) and George (David Rintoul) at their Tuscan villa. She starts to spend more time with the younger teenage children Archie (Harry Kershaw), Badge (Emma Hiddleston), Jack (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and Oakley (Tom Hiddleston). They smoke some weed and crash a car. The sexual tension boils over as she flirts with the leader of the kids Oakley.It's a British mumbletalk indie. I wish the relationships between the characters are laid out more clearly early on. It would help decipher and build a backstory to their connections if they have any. They need to throw in a few lines like "I haven't seen you since you were this tall." It would help to build tension in the first half of the movie. The older people also need to have some in-depth talk in the first half. It would fill out their characters. Anna has very curt conversations with Verena. This feels like a bunch of strangers and it's not until the second half that things get a little bit interesting.

Someone once said, "It's the singer, not the song". Here, it's difficult to know which is responsible for the effect created by this film -- the cast, or the writing (and by extension, directing). Certainly, Ms. Hogg deserves credit for her sure, understated camera-work and pithy screenplay. The film demonstrates, in equal measure, both a sense of forward movement (in terms of plot and tension), and a verisimilitude of action and speech. There is a quasi-documentary feel to the proceedings; we enter and view scenes from odd angles, with the camera in a corner, or down a hall from the intended dialogue; scenes begin and end in medias res. The effect is never, however, mannered or jarring, but is calculated for maximum dispatch in terms of character and plot development.However, the performances themselves are so fine, so delicately thatched and inked as to leave the impression of real people, and not "roles" played by professionals. Chief among them is Ms. Worth's turn as Anna, who is not quite as hapless, or feckless, as some of the other reviewers on this site would have indicated. It is interesting to see those viewers' reactions to her pass at the younger Oakley which characterize it as disgusting, or out-of-touch. In another movie (say an Irvine Welsh adaptation, for instance) a woman like Anna would get at least two fairly raunchy sex scenes. This is not to short-change Ms. Worth's physical attractiveness; in fact, the heat between her character and that of Mr. Hiddleston's is palpable. But Ms. Hogg is not after the same sort of effect as Irvine Welsh; this film is a slow-burner. And Ms. Worth finds her footing surely in the lazy Tuscan atmosphere, conveying thousands of words with just a look. Take, for instance, her semi-squint in reaction to Oakley's prying questions about children. The answer is writ large between the drawn-up lower lids, the slight pucker to the mouth. Further to Ms. Worth's credit is that her background is theatre and opera (she has done some choral roles with major productions) neither of which genre is famous for the slight gesture, or subtlety of reading. Here, though, she is "playing chamber music", and not blasting grand opera to the back of the house. All told, this is probably one of the best films to come across this reviewer's screen in the last twenty years.

Not the most imaginative title for a film. But it does describe what goes on.Hot summer holidays in Tuscan villas. When the Sienna Palio is on. I've known one of them. Lazing about with strangers. Wondering what, or if, you've got anything in common.I wouldn't have wanted to have been holidaying with this lot though. With this well to do poncey lot. Even the pompous prig George is calling Oakley his "supercilious prat of a son" (Oakley, i ask you!) The dope smoking teenagers are spoilt public school types. Whooping and whaling it up. Pinching traffic cones. Wrecking the neighbours car. I wanted to give that Oakley a slap around his conceited curly big head.I didn't feel much sympathy for Anna either. I've known women like her: self-absorbed middle-class 40′s something women who self-pity about not having kids, and are neurotically going through a self-induced mid life crisis about everything (failing relationship, career choice etc) but also about nothing at all really: you're no longer young; you can no longer have it all – flippin get over yourself! That's what i would have wanted to say to this Anna. If I'd been there. But I wasn't. Small mercies!Yes, this film actually makes you feel relieved not to have been there in sun-drenched Tuscany; such summer holidays seem like excessively empty exercises in vapid self-indulgence. Especially given todays impoverished (and imperiled) economic climate. Anyway, Anna tries having a crush on Oakley. She's old enough to be his mother. She's misread all the signs. Or maybe the conceited prat has sort of idly lead her on. But I feel little sympathy for her. In a way, its good he rejects her; wakes her up to herself, how adrift she is in her life. Painful realisation. Gotta grow up here. Get back into Adult. So lets drop that little sh and it in it (he'd wrecked the car and tried to get away with it) Not that she's done it out of adult moral responsibility – more like vengeful spite (at being rejected) Anna's late confessional scene with friend Verena in hotel is overwrought and self-consciously neurotic – but that could have been the over-reacting of the actress – not able to suggest more sympathetic qualities (maybe that's why this was her first film – her acting isn't up to much) Interview extra with Joanna Hogg:"Many of the important events are off screen – its more powerful when you hear something and don't see it; what the audience is imagining is happening is a lot more interesting than what i could show them" Which might be another way to say i don't have the ability to make it imaginatively interesting. A kop out. But I'll give her rationale the benefit of the doubt.Anna is trying to capture unexpressed adolescent yearnings (the hanging out with Oakley and Co) But its all vanity. And all in vain. So grow up! "I tried for not an obvious kind of beauty ala Merchant Ivory heritage Tuscany" Yes, i could see that. Mind you, sometimes the camera-work could have done with being of a better quality: night scenes were chronically under lit; dialogues were indistinct, sometimes inaudible. But Hogg says they had a cheap camera to work with. Explains, but doesn't excuse why you can't hear half of whats being said.Says she was aiming at a truth – true for her – that expresses what she hears and sees is true-to-life of the life and particular milieu around her. I got that. And i think she achieved it. Despite my criticisms i think this film did capture quite authentically something awkward and actual, something painfully real. About how social and self exclusion often feed off and into one another.Watching this privileged lot smugly sloshing back their red bottles of vino I'd have felt – and was feeling – as unrelated as Anna was.

If you wanted a villa holiday in Tuscany this summer and didn't have time, go to this film and by the end you will feel you have spent a fortnight there. Joanna Hogg has created an upper-middle class version of a Mike Leigh film at his slowest. It's beautifully done, and the fortnight is mostly enjoyable, unless you squirm at the sight of drunken Brits abroad or the sound of the upper-middle classes (I developed a thick skin for both of these a long time ago, myself). The characterisation is subtle, verging on invisible. There's very little intellectual content or sparkling conversation, surely unrealistic in a film about the chattering classes? Perhaps it's the prodigious amount of alcohol that's consumed. All this keeps the focus on Anna, on holiday from her unhappy situation at home, and the cheerfully pie-eyed teenagers that she hangs out with.The movie was very thin on plot, yet there did seem to be inconsistencies on the departure date for some of the party. I doubt I'll watch it again to check this though; once is nice, but enough.