Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski
Starring: Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine

Tales of teen romance during the long, lazy summer holiday are familiar fare for the movies. However My Summer of Love is miles away from the guys and dolls glamour of Grease or the first love fairy tale of My Girl. It tells the story of two girls who form an intense friendship that develops into an affair in a depressed village, both economically and geographically, in a West Yorkshire valley.

Mona (Natalie Press) is an orphan living in the family pub with her brother Phil, an ex-con who found God whilst in prison. Pouring all the alcohol down the drain, he turns the pub into a meeting house for his evangelical Christian Group. Contemptuous of their spiritual fanaticism and dumped by her married lover, Mona spends her time riding around the countryside on a moped with no engine. Her meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt), recently expelled from boarding school and out riding her horse. They strike up a friendship though they are polar opposites and not just in terms of wealth. Tamsin is a fantasist and talks like a typical melodramatic, if well educated, teenage girl, while Mona deals in grim reality. With her mother on tour with a theatre group and her father shacked up with his secretary, Mona declares herself “practically an orphan”, with no regard for Mona who never knew her father and whose mother died of cancer when she was a child. She impresses Mona with her shallow understanding of Nietzsche but it is Mona who is the true nihilist. Her humourous prediction of a future working in an abattoir and marrying a real bastard before dying of cancer is an ominous acceptance of her reality.

While their relationship strengthens so does Phil’s commitment to God. Where director Pawlikowski places the girls in the stillness of the hills surrounding the village and the eerie quiet of Tamsin’s parent’s country manor, the rabble and prayers of the Christian meetings are shot with the clamour and commotion of a documentary. Phil decides to erect a large cross on the hillside to save the village from sin, (giving Mona the best line of the film, “I have no intention of coming to your crucifixion’) but you sense his faith will be tested by Tamsin. When he first meets her she is wearing a devil-red dress and later she watches him from her window while eating an apple. She delights in the idea of toying with a man struggling for redemption, blind to the potential consequences.

The film is a heady mix of religion, rural life, love and teenage angst but it is handled delicately by the director. It’s slow pace and natural dialogue give it a French feel, while the gorgeous soundtrack from Goldfrapp adds to the dreamy mood. The acting is superb, especially from newcomer Natalie Press whose fierce character is played with appropriate control. The understated feel of the film only begins to drag around the middle but the final part brings the story back into focus with an intriguing turn of events.

Amidst the hype surrouding the tedious Layer Cake, My Summer of Love is the best British film you'll see this year.

words: Colm Larkin