If you’re looking to get back with your ex, have you considered shipping her your child? This week, Leigh and Ellie talk about the 2020 Netflix film Summerland for this Lez-ssentials episode, a recurring segment on the essential movies and TV shows in the lesbian canon. If you have not yet seen this movie, the plot essentially is this: Reclusive lesbian hermit Alice gets stuck taking care of Frank, an 11 year old child evacuee she absolutely did not want, during WW2. At first glance this movie does not look like much of a Lez-ssentials, but it turns out that Alice taking care of Frank specifically is the absolute gayest thing she could ever do. Somehow it’s even gayer than her usual thing of investigating myths for her books, brooding on a cliffside, and scaring kids off her lawn.
Through flashbacks we see a much younger Alice in the late 1920s meeting the girl who is to become the catalyst that shifts her whole world on its axis, ie. the first girl Alice falls in love with. Vera says, “I know a place” and takes Alice to a gay bar, as one does. At first their relationship is wonderful and sweet, but things go sideways when Vera realizes that she wants a family more than she wants to be with Alice. She completely wrecks Alice’s heart and goes off to find a man to be with so that she can have the child she has always wanted. After seeing Alice get her heart stomped on, we understand better how she has turned into essentially the village witch. The baby gay to old crone pipeline is strong.
In true nonsensical romance movie logic that is somehow not just an AO3 fic plot, Frank turns out to be Vera’s son. When his father ends up being killed in the war, Frank runs away back to London and finds that his home was destroyed in the bombings. Alice goes after him and promises he can stay with her forever. She takes him home and of course Vera is waiting for them on the porch. Vera tells Alice that there was no one else she would have wanted taking care of her son and she had to go to something like 20+ stores to find someone who could get her address. In a roundabout way, Vera and Alice end up together with the family Vera always wanted.
At the end of the episode, stick around to hear our original song based on Summerland titled “Summerland” written by Leigh Holmes Foster and produced by Ellie Brigida.
