Thursday 25 June 2015
Pawel Pawlikowski | UK, 2004 | 86 mins | Cert. 15
Sandwiched between the brilliant asylum-seeker UK seaside drama, Last Resort (2000), and Ida (2013), his widely acclaimed Polish film about a 1960s nun excavating the buried remnants of her dead Jewish parents and the Holocaust, Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love (2004) seems at first glance like somewhat lighter fare.
Freckled, working-class, sardonic teenager Mona (Natalie Press) meets the refined and confidently bourgeois public schoolgirl Tamsin (Emily Blunt) in their Yorkshire village during the summer holidays. The two girls rapidly become the proverbial “unlikely friends”, each seemingly fascinated by the other’s taste for honesty, transgression and an excitingly personal form of mysticism. For Mona, Tamsin provides not only glamour and acceptance from an unlikely, exalted and privileged source, but also temporary respite from the stress of living with her unpredictable, born-again Christian brother Phil (Paddy Considine). Can something beautiful, unfettered and real finally be emerging in Mona’s unprepossessing existence?
My Summer of Love is a quite startling observation of a few intense weeks in the life of a young woman at an existential crossroads. It is difficult to think of a British film in recent memory that seems so effortlessly to combine beauty and genuinely breathtaking romance with such a devastating critique of sexualised inter-class relations and the horror of the potential for emotional vampirism at the heart of both summer and “love”.