Film review: Summer in February - This love triangle featuring Dan Stevens and Dominic Cooper fizzles rather than sizzles

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Then and now: Dan Stevens with Emily Browning in ‘Summer in February’

Christopher Menaul's drama is based on a personal tragedy in the life of the artist AJ Munnings, later President of the RA.

Dominic Cooper plays the hard-drinking, poetry-reciting Munnings during a time (1913-14) when he was cock of the walk at Lamorna, Cornwall, among a colony of artists.

When a well-born young woman, Florence Carter-Wood (Emily Browning) arrives in their midst she catches the eye of former soldier Gilbert Evans (Dan Stevens), but it's Munnings she agrees to marry – to nobody's satisfaction.

Andrew Dunn's photography captures the wild Cornish coast and its lemony light rather wonderfully, though the script (by Jonathan Smith from his own novel) struggles to rise above the blandness of a Sunday teatime serial.

The love triangle never comes into focus, and sudden bursts of drama fizzle like damp fireworks. Cooper plays the part on one boorish note, while Browning and Stevens are terribly drippy.