Movie Review: My Summer of Love

After sitting down with 2004's My Summer of Love, which somehow rates 91% on RottenTomatoes.com, I couldn't help ask myself, "how could a maturation film about lesbians go so wrong?" Two answers come to mind: the first is the characters and the second is the aesthetics. Both are fundamental to the film-going experience.

It is likely that the reason we watch film is linked to both our interest in sharing stories, and experiencing the visual. The ability to tell stories was something that evolved to help us understand the world better, and hence better survive. The love of the visual also reflects the social tendencies that enhance our survival, although the extent of a society's love of the visual may depend on whether it is a literate or oral culture. Still, for this reason, most art and literature has always reflected our interest in human beings.

Yet, as I have seen in so many writers, directors and critics, the majority of courses and books on filmmaking do not start with this at their basis. It's all about conflict and cool shots they tell people, and as a consequence we end up with films like Somersault and My Summer of Love. The truth is that a great film is not one with lots of quiet sequences with alienated characters and softly spoken dialogue, it is one that integrates aesthetics with honest depictions of human beings.

In terms of character, My Summer of Love fails because, while each of the characters do stand out from one another and have distinct personalities, they fail to generate self-recognition in the audience. This might be because of the acting, but I'm inclined to think it has more to do with the pacing, and subject matter.

Compare My Summer of Love with Brokeback Mountain. In the latter, the love scenes were filled with tension and anxiety and that certain silence that we have understood in our own lives, while the former tends to skip between a variety of scenes where the girls are spending time together and playing and getting close yet fails to give us the experience of how one thing really leads onto another. The folly of the approach used by the film in question is that it offers us little insight or empathy with the characters.

Article Author: Jonathan Scanlan

Jonathan Scanlan is currently employed as a market research interviewer after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. His distaste for the sweet things in life has led him to savour those things that genuinely nourish the body and mind, as well as cultivate …

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