Tennis pro Tom lives in a mellow paradise teaching tourists at a hotel in the Canary Islands. “Permanent sun, permanent fun,” as one client puts it. But why does it also look a bit like Groundhog Day: every day, Tom gets up, coaches people on hitting the ball, visits his friend who has a farm or maybe goes to a nightclub, and the next morning wakes up in someone else’s bed, hung over again. The Canary Islands is not a circle of hell, granted, but he’s getting close to circling the drain.
Not that Tom, played by a rumpled Sam Riley, ever looks especially perturbed: when Islands begins, he’s waking up on a desert dune for a change, but he heads to his car and just gets on with his day at the four-star-ish hotel. Soon after, Jan-Ole Gerster’s slow-burn drama ignites when a watchful new hotel guest, Anne (Stacy Martin), arrives wanting tennis lessons for her 7-year-old. But she seems to yearn for something more from Tom, quietly but unmistakably, and Islands will largely live in the space between her and Tom, and what might be connecting them.
Anne is visiting with her husband, Dave (Jack Farthing), who also gloms onto Tom, and the polite tennis maven becomes their de facto tour guide, leading to suitably spectacular shots of the island’s beaches, pellucid skies, and caves. But the couple prove unable to conceal their ongoing spats over money (they seem to rely on Anne’s family) and more. That tension turns from irritating to troubling as the film cruises into mysterious waters when the palpably desperate Dave disappears after sneaking away to a club with a wary Tom.
Dave’s vanishing amplifies the existential drift of Gerster’s story, partly in the long L’Avventura tradition of missing persons triggering a reckoning (or not) among those left behind. Tom does find some new purpose in comforting Anne and assisting her with searching for Dave, asking a cop friend and poking around the town’s postcard-ready rocky harbor. He bonds with their cherubic-looking son, Anton (Dylan Torrell), with notable ease. But Anne radiates disillusionment over Dave’s absence and soon an unnerving awareness of an alternate future.
Riley is a sure fit for the scenario. Probably still best known for playing a fresh-faced Ian Curtis in Control over 15 years ago, the lanky actor has grown into a gently lined middle age, with a John Hurt-like wounded creak to his voice. Despite Tom’s years of watching blithe vacationers going through same motions, Riley wisely forgoes a too-cool cynicism for the character. His Tom goes through his routines with slight weariness but also diligence, at times flashing an innocent surprise in his eyes — all of this more affecting than pure burn-out.
Perhaps inevitably, the screenplay by Gerster, Blaž Kutin, and Lawrie Doran latches onto the police investigation into Dave’s disappearance, which necessitates Tom playing Spanish translator for Anne. The local insinuating detective (Ramiro Blas) probably wouldn’t mind if the plot turned nefarious. But the police attention mainly serves to prick Anne and Tom along in confronting their regrets and the possibility of re-routing their lives, though neither seems able to figure out just how.
The film teases a will-they-or-won’t-they frisson about the two, and occasionally taps a lush score that wafts in the romantic melancholy of a 1960s American melodrama (making one wonder if the score from May December is starting to have its first, unironic imitations). Martin, ever elegant but rarely a wildly expressive actor, could perhaps do with showing a bit more emotional urgency here to sharpen the interplay with Tom, especially in this naturally languid seaside backdrop.
Tom’s orbit is neatly fleshed out with a hotel receptionist, Maria (a sly Bruna Cusí), who does favors while giving him crap about his slouching lifestyle, and a friendship with a Moroccan farmer, Raik (filmmaker Ahmed Boulane), and his wife. Raik’s wandering camel supplies a ready symbol of restlessness for everyone’s evolving state of mind and yields the most dramatic image in the understated film, which was shot primarily on Fuerteventura.
The boldest aspect of Islands is that there’s no effort to make this discontent seductive (or ugly, for that matter). This can be downright disorienting given the proud cinematic legacy of beautiful actors having the blahs. Tom’s nagging emptiness does not have a core of profundity, but he’s also not passed off as a comic type (despite hauling out the same story about a bet with Rafael Nadal). Despite the subtropical trappings, his stasis has a fundamental ordinariness, and that turns his trouble in paradise into a more universal call to stop sleepwalking through life.
Title: Islands
Festival: Berlin (Special Gala)
Director: Jan-Ole Gerster
Screenwriters: Jan-Ole Gerster, Blaž Kutin, Lawrie Doran
Cast: Sam Riley, Stacy Martin, Jack Farthing, Dylan Torrell
Sales agent: Protagonist Pictures
Running time: 2 hrs 3 mins
