Dir. Pawel Pawlikowsky, 2004, UK, 86 mins
Cast: Paddy Considine, Nathalie Press, Emily Blunt
Two teenage girls, Mona (Press) and Tamsin (Blunt), meet in a quiet Yorkshire town one summer. They form an intense friendship that helps them cope with their own dysfunctional families. Mona struggles with a overbearing brother (Considine) who has used his time in prison to become a religious zealot. Tamsin comes home for the holidays from boarding school to an empty house and parents who have little time for her. The girls use their summer of love as a time to explore their sexuality and use their heightened feelings of power to wreak vengeance on those who have wronged them.
Loosely based on a novel by Helen Cross, Pawel Pawlikowsky's follow-up to Last Resort is an equally poignant study of human relationships against a backdrop location Pawlikowsky clearly feels is as essential to the picture as his characters. Working with Last Resort 's cinematographer (Ryszard Lenczewski) and editor (David Charap), the same feelings of marginalisation, disenchantment and entrapment bought about by the circumstances of environment can be found in My Summer of Love. This time the mood is lifted by the bright English countryside (as opposed to the bleak wintery English seaside), but which nevertheless remains a blank canvas for secrets and pain.
As well as being a bitter-sweet love story, My Summer of Love is also one of Nietzschen polarities and a comment on belief in all its various guises. Our two protagonists Mona and Tamsin cross the class divide in a friendship united by bored attraction rather than a common experience. When they meet Mona has just bought a motorbike without an engine and is wheeling it along as Tamsin literally talks down to her from a horse. Tamsin lives in an empty mansion, whilst Mona shares a disused pub with her brother Phil. As Mona's home-pub is called The Swan, Tamsin plays a piece of music called The Swan on her cello. The adolescents are both in some sense orphans, Mona really so with only her brother to look after her ("Just me, my brother and God"), and Tamsin with parents who are never home. "God's dead," states Tamsin, quoting Nietzsche to Mona and voicing her nihilistic tendencies. "It must be interesting to believe in something," she muses, belittling both Phil's religious devotion, and acting in direct opposition to Mona's need to be loved - both by her brother and Tamsin.
In fact Tamsin's upper-class self-confidence and intelligence, her decadent run of the family mansion, is as intoxicating to Mona as religion is to Phil. Both sides set about trying to destroy what the other has created, and it is hard to see which side the film comes down in favour of: a belief in nothing or something - if either. Belief is presented at such extremes that perhaps the film is critical of the reality of any emotion manifested at its zenith. "If you leave me I'll kill you," says Tamsin to a delighted Mona; "With God his life is like one long orgasm," Mona says of Phil, who uses Christianity as a drug with which to fend off his violent nature. Similarly Phil's ultra-chaste life is contrasted to the girls' lounging around Great Gatsby-style, languidly in dressing gowns, smoking and getting drunk. Ultimately both lifestyles prove unsustainable for all the characters, who seem unable to find a happy medium.
Despite it's romantic title, My Summer of Love also pulsates with an undercurrent of anger. Phil is consumed by repressed rage, which we glimpse only fleetingly, and in such compromising circumstances that his prophet-like status seems weakened more by gullibility than uncontrolled physical strength. Mona's desperation to have the pre-religious Phil returned to her is channelled into an obsession with Tamsin and a desire to humiliate her brother. Tamsin is the archetypal bored princess, let down by her family she turns this rejection into deflected hatred: "Men like that should be castrated," she says of Mona's married ex-lover.
Phil's goal throughout the film has been to raise a giant iron cross on the Yorkshire moors, to stand resolutely over the town, it's thick grey appearance a reminder both of religious repentance and Phil's predatory religious practices. As Phil's followers help carry the cross to its resting place, Mona and Tamsin sit and mock him. He ignores them as he delivers his sermon, and they ignore his speech with their chastising. Here in essence the film gives us a micro-representation of the inability of the believer and non-believer to hear each other.
Paddy Considine gives his customary first-class performance as intransigent Phil, showing that he can rise to a varied range of sensitive portrayals of men on the brink of emotional exhaustion. But the film has quite rightly been hailed as a brilliant showcase for the talents of newcomers Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt, whose screen inexperience never lets them down - a tribute both to their performance and Pawlikowsky's direction. Pawlikowsky has a knack for bringing out the best in unknown acting talent, and the chemistry is evident between Blunt and Press (who has been compared to a young Samantha Morton).
In whatever way the film makes us think about belief and religion, as we sit trying to make up our minds as to whether we would be happier with or without it, the end of the film leaves us reeling even further. Pawlikowsky has once again created a superb venture into how people make the best of dysfunctional relationships, and has revealed his continuing fascination with modern interpretations of family. That we seem unable to trust the people we are closest to is a sad musing by My Summer of Love, but Mona's journey toward independence, her rites of passage in a sense, and her final act that reveals her acquired strength of character is wonderfully uplifting.
Rebecca Kemp
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