Rife with both summery nostalgia, and traumatic undertones, Last Summer is a coming-of-age film set in rural Wales, inspired in part by writer/director Jon Jones’ memories of childhood. Fedor Tot looks closer.
Brooks, woods and fields have been part of many a childhood, especially in Wales, where an abundance of greenery means plenty of room to roam in. Last Summer, the feature film debut directed by TV veteran Jon Jones harks back to a childhood in Wales many might remember, although its themes of trauma and its rippling effects might be somewhat less commonplace.
Set somewhere in rural Wales sometime around the mid-70s, we follow a group of boys – Davy and Iwan Davies, Rhys and Robbie Morris – as they spend their summer holidays mucking around in the countryside near their village, occasionally crossing paths with Kevin Morris, an older sibling who teaches them how to catch and kill fish and various other ‘boy’s-own-adventure’ shenanigans.
One day, tragedy strikes. The Morris siblings’ mother starts to leave; in retaliation, her husband shoots her before killing himself, and the boys are all witness to the horror. What follows from then on is an exploration of grief and trauma, with the four responding to the shock in different ways, with a particular focus on Davy (Noa Thomas), who rejects the trauma most fervently out of the four.
For director Jon Jones, even though Last Summer tells a somewhat universal story, it is filtered through a particularly Welsh specificity, that of growing up in rural West Wales as a child. “I grew up in a kind of strange time; there was an awful lot of change going on, and I suppose I was witness to a lot of that. The rural world was very small and very isolated, with lots of small little farms that were trying to hang on to things as the modern world came along and swept them all away. I remember there was an element of desperation in people at that time, as they tried to deal with these economic forces that were driving them to sell up. But as a kid, we could kind of run around this beautiful landscape that was less manic than it is now, and felt entirely free – so when various adult things were happening, we just sort of pressed on.”
There’s a sense of wanting to record a specific sense of ‘ordinary’ Welsh culture, he admits, “before it completely disappears, because the world is connected differently now.” Fish and chips for tea; abandoned buildings ripe for turning into mini playgrounds; Penguin chocolate bars lifted from biscuit tins (a more commercially developed script would have changed a small detail like that to just ‘chocolate’). The cast and crew are almost entirely Welsh too, making use of natural accents. It’s small details but it contributes to a sense of reality, of the specificity of the location adding to the universality of the story.
The story itself is filmed firmly from Davy’s point of view – there’s not a single shot of an adult that’s taken from above waist height, and many of those adult conversations between parents, police and social care services after the murder-suicide are glimpsed from behind doorways. “It’s how he perceives everything in the story,” Jones says. “I think one could possibly criticise that, because we don’t really delve into why the murder happens, but as a child I think you don’t process things like that. Davy processes it really weirdly.
“I was interested in how children deal with traumatic events – different children deal with things differently, but this particular child decided not to process it in a way. He just wanted his childhood to continue, and therefore refuses to acknowledge these very complicated adult things that were going on. It’s really a film about a boy trying to hang on to his childhood, and the sadness of the fact that as he tries to hold on to his childhood, he’s going to lose it.
“His values are so small. We live in this age of superheroes, where generally people have to save the world, and I’m aware that it’s an odd thing therefore to make a film about a kid literally just trying to do his best for his mates and all these tiny things, but I think that’s what stuck with certain people.”
That stubbornness and small-world sincerity played into working with the child actors too, who rise to the dramatic weight placed on them admirably. “That was all part of the challenge. I was trying to get to a point with very inexperienced actors to try and tell this story. It was an amazing experience working with these boys because, interestingly, they were quite like the kid in the story, who doesn’t really think about things, and can’t quite understand the significance of them. The character lives in a very binary world of good and bad, and he’s not looking to understand; he just wants his childhood back.
“The kids, when they approached the job of acting, were similarly unphased by ‘ooh look, it’s a big movie and I’m gonna be an actor, and I’ve gotta think about my process, and my direction and motivations’. They just went at it, as kids do: ‘right, I’m going to throw myself into this, and I’m not going to think too much about it, I’m not gonna try and process that, I’m just gonna do it.’”
Richard Harrington, who plays Dai – a neighbouring farmer who appears largely as an ambivalent and mysterious figure for the kids – surmises, “It could be the worst day of your life and the best day of your life. Obviously, kids’ attention spans are not as broad as ours… even though mine’s questionable at times. You can either embrace it, which is what I learnt to do, or you fight against it, which is a losing battle. What I got out of it was their enthusiasm for life, which can only infect what you do on screen. It makes the dramatic scenes even more poignant, really.”
Finally, one last minor miracle within Last Summer. Filmed in Wales, much of its outdoor scenes are in glorious sunshine. How fortunate was Jon Jones? “It was a lot of luck!” he laughs. “We did cheat a bit in post-production, the odd sky we replaced, but there was luck involved in the whole thing. I mean, we made it with £750,000, which is ridiculous, so we didn’t have much wriggle room – if anything went wrong, we were done. So we were very, very lucky.” Nothing did go wrong, and out of comes one of the finer Welsh films in recent memory.
Last Summer is out in cinemas from Fri 7 June