Arts
Young Women In Love
 |
Young
Women In Love |
by Euan Bear
My
Summer of Love |
The
friend I had bumped into at the theatre told me later that My Summer
of Love "certainly wasn't anything like I was expecting."
Teenage girls from different backgrounds meet one summer, bond in their
isolation and alienation across class lines, and magic happens. Well,
yes and no.
It's not exactly a coming of age story.
It's not a simple teenage romance (not that teenage romance is ever as
simple as patronizing adults like to think). And it's not in the least
bit pornographic, even with a male director framing the shots (although
this male director, Pawel Pawlikowski, has made a name for himself for
his "outsider" points of view).
From the first scene, there's the
engineless scooter working-class "Mona" Lisa (Natalie Press)
rides down a dusty Yorkshire road. And the first interaction she has with
Tamsin (Emily Blunt) is looking up from flat on the ground to the rich
girl’s horseback height.
There's Mona's ex-con brother Phil
(Paddy Considine) pouring the house stock of booze down the drain of their
late mother's pub as, in an excess of born-again zeal, he pursues his
vision of turning the pub into a spiritual center for Christians to "bring
hope back into this valley."
The sun pours down like magic molten
gold on gorse- and heather-covered hills, one of which will be the site
of the massive wood and iron cross Phil is building. The honeyed glow
halos red-haired Mona and burnishes even Tamsin's brunette locks.
Tamsin has been suspended from her
boarding school, and is thus home for an indeterminate period. Mona apparently
has left school or is on summer vac. Parents are either dead (Mona) or
missing in action (Tamsin). Not much impinges on the intensity of their
self-focused world. Their bond grows when Tamsin takes Mona in a taxi
to see where her father's car is parked outside the home of his assistant
(though she seems more offended that the assistant is a blowsy broad than
that her dad is betraying his marital vows to her mother, who is traveling).
Mona dashes up to the car, picks
up a garden gnome and smashes the driver's side window, exacting an impulsive
vengeance on Tamsin's behalf, impinging on the oblivious adult. Later
Tamsin returns the favor, embarrassing Mona's married ex-boyfriend in
public and telling his wife about the affair. But so isolated are the
two that there are no consequences for either action.
Press and Blunt are novices
in the film world, but there is definitely chemistry between them. Pawlikowski
gave all the actors an outline of the major points of the script, but
encouraged collaboration and improvisation. Blunt said in an interview
on National Public Radio that Pawlikowski asked her what else she did,
and then incorporated her admitted cello playing into one scene. The script
is loosely based on a novel by Helen Cross, although the novel includes
murder and a miner's strike (which would explain the desperate need to
"bring hope back into the valley" via the seductive dream of
a personal god who rewards goodness).
Mona has dreams, lofty and less so,
and perhaps it's a clue that we never hear Tamsin's. Tamsin has money,
with which she buys an engine for Mona's scooter, freeing them both, at
least temporarily. Tamsin is a mirror reflecting the self-delusions of
others, catching them at it and laughing while excusing herself as a "fantasist."
My Summer of Love is an achingly
beautiful film, gold over life's gritty gravel, and guess which one prevails?
It's a movie about acting and surface and seeming versus passion and commitment
and truth. It's a film worth seeing when it arrives at the Savoy this
fall or when it comes out in DVD, although, unless you have a large-screen
home-theater, the impact of the countryside will be diminished.
My Summer of Love will remind
you of your first love, and how hard it is to find someone worthy of your
trust, and how easy it is to break someone's heart. It will remind you
of how, afterward, you moved on.