The summer in question is 1944, but with all the English and American accents it's easy to forget the setting is meant to be wartime Yugoslavia, where a hapless lifeguard with no one to rescue ("
it's not my fault the beach is safe!") is asked to shelter a partisan refugee and her young son. The language barrier in the English-Yugoslav co-production is evident in the often over-simplistic dialogue (spoken in English, but better suited to subtitles) and in the perhaps too lazily constructed plot. The film is three-quarters over when the first real conflict appears, after the innocent lifeguard saves his first life: a drowning man later revealed to be the local Nazi kommandant. Otherwise, it's a pleasant, undemanding drama, with a beautifully photographed, postcard-perfect setting (outside Karlovic).
Review of That Summer of White Roses
