"A Year in London" leans into old-school lesbian romance, and arrives just as the genre is going soft

Leslie Felperin opens her review in The Guardian of 13 July 2026 with a confession of impatience: "A year is about how long this very quaint film feels," she writes of A Year in London, an Italian-British co-production directed by Francesco Ferrini and released in Italian cinemas earlier in 2026 before arriving on the Guardian's desk this week. The premise is the kind of period-drama set-up that British cinema has been recycling since the Channel 4 enlightenment: a young Italian fashion student on an exchange in London falls for an older, sophisticated British academic, and the two negotiate a slow-burning Sapphic romance against a backdrop of rain-soaked lecture halls and Bloomsbury dinner parties.

The film arrives at a moment when lesbian drama on the big screen is having something close to a bad year. Theatrical openings in 2026 have tilted toward the gauzy and the unresolved; Felperin's verdict is that A Year in London does not push back against that drift so much as lean into it. She calls the picture "frothy," "soap-opera silly," and notes that the two leads have chemistry of a sort, but that the script declines to make either character interesting enough to sustain a feature. The Italian student, played by a rising Milan-stage actor in her first screen lead, is a stock figure: wide-eyed abroad, slightly baffled by British understatement, eventually undone by it. Her professor, an older, English-accented academic of the kind British period drama has been producing since Merchant-Ivory, is "more than usually eloquent about Handel's lesser arias," to Felperin's evident exasperation.

The film works hardest when it stops trying to be melancholy. A late-act scene in a Covent Garden pub, where the two women argue about a translation of Pasolini over a flat pint, is the closest thing to a real exchange in the picture, and Felperin lingers on it. Otherwise the picture retreats into soft-focus cliché: a borrowed scarf, an open window in Bloomsbury, an unearned kiss in the British Library reading room. "There is a whole genre of British lesbian drama," she writes, "that mistakes atmosphere for argument," and A Year in London has fallen, apparently willingly, into it.

What the picture is actually about

The premise, as Felperin summarises it, is a generational inversion of the old European "abroad" drama. The Italian student is the ingenue; the British academic is the world-weary sophisticate. The exchange programme, with its year-long visa and shared student house in Kentish Town, supplies the excuse for proximity. What follows is the standard British mechanism: long walks along the canal, long dinners, an eventual confession of mutual attraction that arrives, Felperin notes, roughly forty minutes after the audience has figured it out. The film is less interested in the affair than in the texture of the city around it. London in A Year in London reads more like a tourist-board brochure than a place where anyone actually pays rent: riverside walks, Regency squares, a Haggerston flat that no lecturer at a Russell Group university could now afford.

Ferrini, who directs from his own screenplay, has made his career in Italian art-house television; this is his first English-language feature, and the production partnership with a small London-based company gave the shoot access to some genuinely handsome Georgian interiors. Felperin credits the cinematography in particular, which she describes as "resignedly gorgeous", a phrase that also functions, perhaps not accidentally, as a description of the film as a whole.

The genre problem

Felperin's bigger argument is structural. Lesbian drama in 2026, she suggests, has lost interest in the kind of conflict that used to drive it: class friction, professional jeopardy, the actual risk of being outed in a hostile workplace. Instead the genre has drifted toward what she calls "comfort viewing", love stories in which the central obstacle is not prejudice or peril but a borrowed scarf. A Year in London is not the worst offender in this year's crop, but it is, she argues, the most complacent.

The counter-view worth taking seriously is that audiences, exhausted by a decade of trauma-coded prestige drama, may simply want to watch two women fall in love in a pretty flat. There is a defensible reading of A Year in London as deliberate escapism, a film that chooses atmosphere over argument because atmosphere is what it is selling. Felperin is alert to that reading and partly concedes it; what frustrates her is the picture's instinct to gesture at seriousness, the Handelian subplot, the Pasolini argument, a third-act reference to a real Bloomsbury intellectual circle of the 1930s, without paying any of those gestures off. A film that wanted to be mere comfort, she suggests, would not have littered itself with the toys of seriousness.

What arrives on screen

Felperin's concrete complaints are precise and worth registering. The pacing sags in the second act; the supporting cast is wasted; the British academic is given a putative political past, late-1990s activism, a relationship with a now-deceased novelist, that the script never develops. The Italian student's eventual decision, late in the film, to extend her stay in London has the structural weight of a climax but is resolved in a single two-shot. There is no real sense, Felperin writes, that either woman will be much altered by the affair, which is the deepest problem for any romance, however frothy.

The film's release pattern matters as well. After an Italian theatrical run in early 2026, A Year in London has been moving through European festival stops and is now positioned for a streaming-window premiere later in the year. Felperin reviewed it on the Guardian's film desk on 13 July 2026, ahead of a London preview screening the same week.

What remains uncertain

The picture's commercial fate is hard to read from the sources at hand. Italian opening-week numbers were modest; festival reception has been polite rather than warm; the streaming window, which will determine whether a broader audience ever sees it, has not yet opened. More substantively, the film's relationship to the genre it is working in is itself an open question. A reader who watches A Year in London as honest comfort will find it perfectly pleasant. A reader who watches it as a representative sample of 2026 lesbian drama will find it symptomatic. The sources do not yet adjudicate between those readings; that work is left to the audience.