High Season

The lives of an English expat photographer, her daughter, her player ex, a commie spy, a "00" agent and other English in Lindos, Rhodes, Greece. Its summer time on a gorgeous Greek island, which means it is tourist season. Although local photographer Katherine dislikes the onslaught of the seasonal visitor invasion of her peaceful home, this year she has much greater issues. For starters she is broke; her best friend and confidant, a British art expert, may very well be a Russian spy; her ex-husband is a philandering playboy; and the timid English tourist Branagh on his second honeymoon is actually pursing her. —Anonymous Katherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and her husband Patrick (James Fox), came to live at a coastal town on Rhodes before the tourists discovered it. Their 13-year-old daughter Chloe (Ruby Baker) grew up there. This English couple have irreconcilable differences of opinion--Patrick considers her photography dismissive of modernity; Kath despises his modern sculpture. They continue to live on the island, but separately where he keeps busy "entertaining" the numerous female tourists. He supports himself through his sculpture pieces. She is a photographer who sells photobooks, but is struggling as her latest book isn't selling. She will be forced to give up her house and leave the island she loves unless she can find a buyer for a vase that was given to her many years earlier by a famous, now elderly art historian, Basil Sharp (Sebastian Shaw), who arrives for a visit. Katherine's widowed friend Penelope (Irene Papas) regards the tourists as enemies, an army of occupation, and battles with her son Yanni, who appreciates the prosperity the tourists bring. Rick (Kenneth Branagh), a practical-minded Englishman, fixes Kath's toilet, and becomes smitten by Kath after she rewards him with a passionate kiss. His wife Carol (Lesley Manville) occupies herself with Byron's poetry and the tourist-loving Yanni. The group is completed by Konstantinis (Robert Stephens), a wealthy Greek-American who wants to buy Kath's vase, but needs it to be declared a fake so that he can take it out of Greece. Add in a hunt for a possible Russian spy and a British government agent on vacation. On the isle of Rhodes, Katherine, an expatriate English photographer, lives with her daughter. A young local wants to encourage tourism, so he commissions a sculpture of the Unknown Tourist for the town square; the sculptor he brings to Rhodes is Kate's ex-husband. Also there to see Kate is Sharp, an aging antiquarian and her dear friend. He has something important to tell her. As Kate, her ex, and Sharp sort out things that go back years, two English tourists bumble about, one thinking he's fallen in love with Kate, his wife thinking she's found her own lover. A rare vase, a spy, old friendships, the statue's unveiling, and off-hand English sorting-out play into the resolution. —<jhailey@hotmail.com>