My Summer of Love
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski.
Starring Natalie Press, Emily Blunt and Paddy Constantine.
This film begins with Mona (Natalie Press) passionately drawing a portrait of her lover onto her bedroom wall. The camera captures the intensity of the moment; her despair is palpable.
My Summer of Love is emotionally raw, I felt tired after watching it. Three amazing performances intertwine in a story of love, exploitation and betrayal. Mona is a young woman searching for an escape from the awful people around her. Her brother Phil (Paddy Constantine) is a fundamentalist born-again Christian who aims to convert their pub from a dwelling of sin to a welcoming place where anyone can come to learn about God. Their troubled relationship is further injured when Mona meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt) who has been suspended from school for being a ‘bad influence’. They intrigue each other and the unlikely friendship develops. Tamsin, however, is exploiting Mona without having any grasp of the consequences of her actions.
Each of these performances is entirely convincing — so check out some great new British talent now! I thought it was a great film, with interesting, carefully drawn characters.
“It’s not the usual coming of age tale… It’s something far more surprising”, comments producer Tanya Seghatchian. Tamsin and Mona are derived from My Summer of Love, a novel by Helen Cross, but director Pawel Pawlikowski has added other elements, some from his own life. The bold landscape is atypically English, thanks to filming during one of the hottest summers on record and gives a strangely timeless quality to the setting.
My Summer of Love won the Michael Powell Award for best British Feature (the highest award) at the 2004 Edinburgh International Film Festival, BAFTA for Outstanding British Film of the Year and London Film Critics’ Circle award for Best British Newcomer (Natalie Press), among other awards.
Marianne Close
As quickly as summer is upon us in all of its lethargy and stillness, so is the deep stirring of a young and restless love. And as quickly as the nights turn chill and dark before its time, summer leaves and so does the young and restless love.
Mona (newcomer Natalie Press) is lost. Her parents have died and left her in the care of her brother Phil (Paddy Considine), who is introduced to us while he is pouring all of the liquor in the family-owned hotel down the drain. He’s found God and, in the process, left Mona without a friend in the world.
Tamsin (newcomer Emily Blunt) is spoiled rich with culture and sophistication. She is bored and lonely, spending her summer away from boarding school, in her mansion drinking glasses of red wine and sherry while her father has an affair with his secretary.
The two girls couldn’t be more different and it is the differences that attract them to one another. Mona is feisty, an in-the-moment girl with a grand sense of humour and Tamsin is a fantasist, always living in her head and speaking on grand terms. The attraction is immediate. The love story that emerges before us is believable. We see how much the girls feed off one another and cling to each other as friendship turns to passion and then to desperation, all in the short time of one summer holiday.
This is a compulsive tale of love told from writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort). The film warns us of desire and the ease with which love can turn to mind games if taken too far for all the wrong reasons. The girls are fantastic. Their chemistry seems organic and we enjoy every intoxicating moment spent with them, though occasionally we’re left feeling tense about Tamsin’s motives. Constantine is superb but with a script like his, the character of Phil has nowhere to go but introspectively and indecently somewhere sublime. He takes us with him, tormented and at a loss for something to believe in. The setting of the film truly depicts the haves and have nots in a subtle and fetching way. There is nothing dramatic in either’s lifestyle; it simply is what it is.
This is one of those Virgin Suicide-type films where you don’t feel invigorated or ultra-tense when you leave the cinema. It’s dreamy. It’s about character, emotions and a lazy summer holiday and upon leaving the cinema, there is a strong desire to wipe your eyes.
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