It's summer in the city and the girls are pretty in Spanish actor Antonio Banderas’s second outing as a director, El camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain). Set in his native Málaga in the 1970s, this elegiac recollection of an extended summer idyll of a group of friends is perhaps too preoccupied with finding the right atmosphere to cross over into the mainstream; the self-consciously arty stance will enthral some (who might decipher the preoccupations of a nascent auteur) and bore others to death. The film won the Europa Cinema label at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and could have some theatrical exposure abroad before finding its way to a long afterlife on DVD and as a cult item on TV.

 

Though as an actor Banderas came to the fore in the works of auteur par excellence Pedro Almodóvar, there is no obvious connection between the work of the auteurist darling of European cinema and Banderas’s work as a director  (except, maybe, their love of bright colours). Unlike writer-director Almodóvar, Banderas seems to rely on novelists to translate their own work into a screenplay: after US author Mark Childress adapted his own Crazy in Alabama for Banderas's directorial debut, for his Spanish feature Antonio Soler adapted his eponymous novel that is literally translated as "The Way of the English", a street where many of the main characters come together and they even enjoy their share of Summer Rain, the English-language title of the film.

 

Also unlike Almodóvar, in El camino de los ingleses there is no clear preoccupation with the individuality of the characters or with breaking down societal taboos and barriers and except for Raul Arévalo (also the best thing about Azuloscurocasinegro / DarkBlueAlmostBlack) as a Bruce Lee-obsessed youngster, the group of youngsters is made up of interchangeable, generically pretty boys and girls.

 

Veteran actor Juan Diego makes a cameo appearance, as does Victoria Abril, who played opposite Banderas in Almodóvar’s ¡Atame! (Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) amongst others. She has a memorable supporting role here as a sexually pent-up typing teacher, though the saturated colours of Xavi Giménez’s (The Machinist) cinematography do her skin no favours.

The film’s strong visuals, many of the enhanced by computer work and montage tricks as well as colour filters, indicate Banderas’s emphasis on mood and atmosphere over storyline specifics and are present from frame one, a cunning turned-on-its-head shot of the face of a young boy (Alberto Amarilla) on an operating table for a dour kidney removal and some Dante and ballet.

 

Though he turns out to be the protagonist of the film, what his story is about exactly is not something that is particularly original nor something that will linger in the mind (he wants to be a poet and wow a pretty wannabe ballet dancer played by María Ruiz). That he -- at least in his eyes -- had a pretty eventful and colourful summer is something that El camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain) makes abundantly clear.

 

When in the mood for a sultry, summery Spanish mood piece, this film might fit the bill. Whether it signals the arrival of a new auteur, that is another matter entirely.

 

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