DVD Review: My Summer of Love

A middle aged bloke makes a film about two teenage girls in the throes of an intense and erotically charged entanglement one hot Yorkshire summer.

Sounds unsavoury, doesn't it? A Brit flick exploring adolescent Sapphic desires...?

It whiffs to high heaven.

All is not as it seems, however. The director of My Summer of Love is Polish-born Brit Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort). The film is based on the novel of the same name by Helen Cross. And like Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Pawlikowski imbues his gorgeous film with a great deal of sensitivity and intelligence.

The story begins with the budding friendship between two 16 year old girls. Tamsin (Emily Blunt) and Mona (Nathalie Press) have lived in the same Yorkshire village all their lives, but have never met, separated as they are by class, money and education. Out on horseback one afternoon, Tamsin comes across Mona daydreaming in a field. They strike up what is at first an awkward, wary conversation, but it ends with an offhanded invitation from Tasmin: "Drop by if you're bored, won't you? I'm here all summer." Both are intrigued by the perceived exoticness of the other and they soon become inseparable.

Natalie Press and Emily Blunt are extraordinarily gifted, nuanced actors. As the pragmatic Mona, Press endows her character with an offbeat, often surprisingly dark sense of humour. When Tamsin asks her what she wants to do with her life, Mona responds spiritedly, “A lawyer!” Then she pauses, grows serious, and says, "I’m gonna get a job in an abattoir, work really ‘ard, get a boyfriend who’s like — a bastard, churn out all these kids, right, with mental problems and then…I’m gonna wait for the menopause. Or cancer.”

She is sharply intelligent (belying her background and education) and is only too aware of the dead end to which her life seems destined.

As the wealthy, spoiled Tamsin, Blunt is deliciously languid and haughty. Frighteningly articulate, she is all glamour, feline grace and cool, level stares. Affecting a world weary cynicism and accustomed as she is to a sheltered, pampered life, she is quite disarmed by Mona's honesty and by the harsh realities of her life: both Mona's parents are dead. She lives above a pub with her older brother, who has just returned from jail a fervent born-again Christian.

As the two girls’ fascination with one another grows, it becomes plain that both are chafing at the confines and expectations of their respective lives, and in each other they sense an escape.

Article Author: Kirsten Cameron

Kirsten Cameron is a displaced New Zealander who somehow ended up in the far flung reaches of the frozen north. Now working and living (and loving it) in Montréal, Canada.

Visit Kirsten Cameron's author page — Kirsten Cameron's Blog