1971@50: SUMMER OF 42

It's 1942 and most of the male role models are in uniform and far from the serene Nantucket Island which is sighing with pleasure through a bright summer. That leaves the friends Hermie, Oscy and the still childlike Benjie free to roam the dunes and town to prank and hang out until school's back in. Barely pushing back the hormones their entire conversation is composed of sex: how to do it, what does it feel like, what to do when it happens, and everything else that a virginal male mind can think to ask. Apart from the ancient instructional tome Benjie has swiped from his holiday house, all they have to go on is their own fantasy. As far as the statistical grab of their imagination and philosophical concern go this telling gets it right. But what happens when sex, the real thing, comes knocking and things have to be done?

I read Summer of 42 as a teenager and like it's characters I concentrated on the sexual bits in it but I was a deep reader for my age and did manage to get the rest of it. While the novel is couched in a lot of sentimentalism and told entirely from a male perspective the notion of coming of age is both signified and fulfilled by sex is dismantled through a quite honest examination of the pre and post coital thinking of adolescents. There is a kind of Lord of the Flies of scale going on as the parentless boys fashion mythology and then are confronted with reality. If Hermie's initiation is set in tragedy, a confusing mix of lust and pity and what feels like a stunning transcendent rite, Oscy's banging gratification leaves him whingeing and as malcontent as a grownup: Hermie has met love and responsibility, Oscy is learning how to manage a supply of body parts.

I refer to the book primarily as the film adapts it very faithfully to the screen. To look at the title sequence now, a slow slideshow of life on the island as Michel Legrand's wistful score tinkles along you might think you're in for a Hallmark reminiscence. Then there's the voiceover: "when I was fifteen and my family came to the island for the summer ..." It's the exact Waltons style smooth-over that launched a million coming-of-age epics for screens of any size. But the first dialogue is competitive, collaborative and on the only subject that most of it will be throughout the running time. This is a coming of age story but its focus on what drives that part of the rites of passage hits the mark: these boys might come across as horny kids but their built for purpose speech renders them into cyborgs.

That's not to say that this is a swing between setnimentalism and science. If Hermie's obssession with the adult Dorothy feels like adolescent idolatry his hilariously clumsy attempts at sounding grown up undercut the worship going uncriticised. If Oscy's boisterous hormonal explosions seem like youth running wild there is also a mechanical feel to him. The sense that he cross as many bridges to adulthood as he likes but he's still going to wander the earth until his control buttons wear out or stick. If Dorothy is the goddess in the castle by the sea she is also a person who lives in a house day by day. The teenage girls Aggie and Miriam are neither pushovers or teasers but individuals. And if the soft focus and dreamy theme music feel like a French New Wave piece the influence of the war within the boys and the one thundering beyond the horizon bring it out of danger.

Last night was the first time I'd seen the film in full and I'd been expecting a soft serve apology for male entitlement but I kept wondering what it would have felt like to watch at around fifteen (which I was a few years after the release date) when the frustration in Hermie and Oscy would have been matched by my own. Honestly, while I would have recognised the improbability of Hermie's path I would have accepted it as an ideal, I would have been watching Oscy and anticipating my own iteration of it, given time and circumstances. My own conversations were not just about sex but it wasn't ever far from the chat and my imagined anatomy and mechanics would have delighted the likes of Salvador Dali and Hieronymous Bosch. 

The adult voice that adds the opening and closing narration might seem like needless schmaltz, given all of this, but it reminds us that we are witnessing a memory with all its nostalgic numbered colouring and smoothed jags: if it seems sentimental here there is a clear sense given of the unease that demands the sheen. And that's the worse thing: if I then also imagine the kind of authoritative narration I would provide for my own version of this as I fashioned the awkwardness, clumsiness, fear and anxiety that led eventually to some form of ease, how would I say these guiding statements to relax anyone at all for the tale? How would you? Yeah, same: keep the focus soft and the music sighing, you can get to the tough stuff easier and still face the mirror the next day.