Summer

I have always believed that those who have a life-long friendships are the lucky ones. Having especially two friendships like that myself, I know what a magnificient thing it is to live through your adulthood with the same people that you grew up together, with those that saw you during the best and worst stages you had been through. They become, without a doubt, the most important people in your life. Shaun and Daz of the movie Summer are two friends like that.



Summer is a 2008 independent UK movie by Kenneth Glenaan, starring Robert Carlyle and Steve Evets, along with Rachael Blake. It is a story of friendship, unforgettable first love and in a more general view, the concept of life and death. Shaun and Daz are two close friends who have spent their all lives together and who have been living together at their 40s, with Daz's problematic son Daniel. Daz is bound to wheelchair due to a motorcycle accident he had in their most important summer, and he is about to die because of many serious health problems including liver, lungs etc. The two have always been quite vibrant, from their childhood days to the present. They both had problems at school, with Shaun being especially quite a slow learner. The fact that Daz is about to die causes Shaun to remember and even relive the details of that summer, sometimes by longing, sometimes by regretting.


The most important detail of Shaun's past, aside from his friendship with Daz, is his first and only love, Katy who also grew up with them and whose first love was Shaun. She is now a solicitor in Sheffield living in the best conditions among the three. With the memories of the past coming back to him more and more intensely every single day, Shaun attempts to get in touch with her, for the first time after that last summer they had together. Being at first quite reluctant to see him again, Katy then visits Shaun one night in the market he works and the two talk a little after a long while, each of them looking quite wasted for different reasons. In a few weeks' time, Daz dies and Shaun has to face the first real loneliness and the biggest loss in his life.


Glenaan's Summer does not tell the most original story ever. What makes it a remarkable and perhaps at some points even much more than just a remarkable movie is the familiar details it has in it, and the dose of intimacy, realism and sensibility. You can not decide which of them, Shaun or Daz, is in a more miserable condition or maybe whether they are really miserable at all, for they have at least each other; despite the quarrels full of f-word they have all the time, you understand what a loss it has been in the bathroom scene of Shaun after Daz died. While Daz's physical condition is an accident, Shaun is intentionally self-destructive, compressing his right hand in the workshop during high school years, crushing his bones and giving permanent damage, and this gives the clue to how intensely he feels; even though he is slow to learn, he is not slow at all to feel.


While I was expecting an average movie of friendship, I got a little surprised at how intense I, myself, felt at the end of the movie, crying together with Shaun. Thus, in order to remind you of your own memories and your friendships, and probably your first and biggest love, you should see Summer and regain your sensibility.