SIGHT AND SOUND

Liverpool. Abe, a young black man, works at a scrap metal yard, along with Jess, daughter of his boss Alan. Without Alan knowing, the two begin to date. In his spare time, Abe boxes on an amateur basis, with some success. He reaches the north-west finals but loses a close bout, after which a visiting boxing manager tries to interest him in fighting professionally. After Alan catches Abe and Jess kissing in his office. Abe is dismissed. Jess leaves with Abe, moving into his flat. While she secures work as a barmaid, Abe is unable to find another job and takes up the offer to turn professional, receiving a small advance.

Jess discovers she is pregnant and she and Abe set about preparing the flat for the baby's arrival. Abe continues to train hard. Jess miscarries and Abe abandons training to stay at home and tend her. Jess is mired in depression but keeps her feelings to herself. Abe becomes frustrated at her lack of communication. He loses his first professional fight when his manager sets him up against an opponent likely to beat him, the manager collecting on a bet made against Abe. Abe returns home to find that Jess has left him.

Dark Summer does not offer much in the way of a story. Little happens, and what does is, in fictional terms, routine. The style, however is anything but routine. First time director and co-writer Charles Teton shoots in Cinemascope and absolutely refuses to move his camera.

The temptation when reviewing the fixed-camera style is to see necessity at work - a limited budget, for instance, or lack of experienced operators (Teton also acts as cinematographer). Nonetheless, the result is a highly coherent, controlled manner which betoken's at the very least a cool weighing-up of resources and an exemplary exploitation of them. Dark Summer has a documentary feel: characters come to the camera, walk into the frame: and the dialogue is very flat. And yet, there's no attempt to achieve an intimate portrait. Liverpool is as prominent as any of the characters, the camera often lingering on a body-free landscape. Or else Abe, out training, runs into a frame and is embedded in the background, dwarfed by the vestiges of the city's industrial past. At such moments the film is fly-on-the-outside-wall, as if trained on a place rather than on people, capturing a general decay, the stillness only broken by Abe's running. The soundtrack from Augustus Pablo complements the images, its steadily insistent reggae carrying an undertow of melancholy.

Teton has taken great care in composing each frame. With outdoor shots, his photography picks out patterns in apparent disorder, finding, for instance, harmony and poise in the mess of machinery and scrap in the yard. The use of Cinemascope only reinforces the sense of watching something carefully constructed. (In this choice, at least, Teton's hand was not forced: using Cinemascope was very much an aesthetic decision.) Dark Summer might aspire somehow to reflect real life but Teton makes it clear that it does so in a highly stylized way. Ultimately, the film suffers perhaps from its own rigor, a rigor which comes to resemble monotony. But as a sustained exercise in a style, it's an impressive debut.

Robert Yates.