My Summer of Love
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Movie Reviews of My Summer of Love
Movie Review: The Apocalyptic Harlot
Summary: 4 Stars
"Three thinkers equal a spider: In every philosophical sect three thinkers follow one after the other in the following way: the first produces out of himself the seed and sap, the second draws it out into threads and spins an artificial web, the third lurks in the web for victims who get caught in it - and tries to live off philosophy. " --Nietzsche
As Tamsin, a prep-school Nietzche quoting outcast tries to impress the unsophisticated Mona, a horse whinnies off-screen. "My Summer of Love" is filled with small touches like this that reveal character and carry the story along in an indirect, almost enchanting manner. Director Pawel Pawlikowski possesses an essential quality of a good filmmaker, the gift for showing more than telling. I'm going to give some details away in this review, so you might want to stop reading if you haven't seen the film.
I haven't read Helen Cross' novel, so going in I had no preconceptions. Another reviewer here compared the film to "Heavenly Creatures." Both stories do unfold in a similar manner, but in the end are dramatically different. In "Heavenly Creatures," the girls have parents but don't want them -- they prefer their fantasies; in "My Summer of Love," the parents are absent (emotionally or physically), while the kids long for their attention.
Keep an eye on the leads' attire during Phil's (Mona's brother) sermon on the mount and in the following bathtub scene. During the majority of the film, Phil is wearing white, while Tamsin wears red. The colors red and white play an important part in the film. In the sermon and bathtub scene, the colors shift, and Tamsin shows small signs that reveal she may have some sincere interest in Phil's newfound religiosity under her smirking cynicism. Here I began seeing the filmmakers weren't taking sides, that maybe Tamsin's fantasy world inhabited by spirits might wind up appearing as unhealthy as Phil's fanaticism, that this film was going to be different than "Heavenly Creatures." I wonder what Tamsin might have done if Mona hadn't popped out of the tub imitating Satan.
"The French forgive crimes of passion."
Judging from the shot of Phil's giant Cross being dwarfed by a smokestack in the foreground, the filmmakers could be siding with Christ's seven woes. In spite of what he preaches throughout the film, Phil looks externally, instead of internally for guidance from his almighty Father. (Near the end of the film, he's definitely not calling out to God for help when he's hunched outside of Mona's room.)
It would've been easy for me to join Mona and Tamsin's ridicule of Phil, and later write him off as a monster, but the filmmakers made it difficult for me to do this, especially when I saw his conflicted grimace as one of his congregation patted him on the back after he'd kicked his sister in the gut.
Paddy Considine gives a respectfully nuanced performance to someone who could have easily been presented as hopelessly corrupt. He gives us someone who sincerely wants to be a better person, someone who grabs hold to the only thing around him that is promising to save him from his violent past. Phil has just been released from prison; he's a man who used to have no problem "puttin' a glass in someone's face." Their father abandoned them. Their mother died of cancer. So, he turns the family pub into a church. He replaces the booze with religion. Meanwhile, Mona finds answers from a mother in Tamsin. (She's lying in a field with sheep when she first meets Tamsin on a white horse.) Instead of building a cross, Mona draws a picture of Tamsin on her wall. In their valley, the masculine and feminine are divided (in the end, Paddy's pub congregation is made up of all men); men and women have lost respect and awareness for each others' innate gifts (note how Mona is discarded by her boyfriend at the beginning of the film), and until those special qualities are brought into the light, appreciated, and integrated, these characters are destined for depression and chaos.
All of the cast and crew seem to have communicated well with each other, as all elements in the film unite into a clear, fine tuned vsion. It is beautifully photographed. At times, the uneasy camerawork and close-ups on the girls' faces reminded me of Polanski's "Repulsion" (if it had been shot in color), which is interesting, because I often found myself being seduced by the depiction of Mona and Tamsin's relationship. Small jolts and zooms are used to show shifts in the characters' thoughts. I've seen this done on television a lot (mainly crime shows), but in this film, it seems to genuinely accentuate the characters' thoughts instead of forcing or inventing them. Sometimes the technique does call too much attention to itself, but aside from a few distracting moments, it added to the film's emotional charge, really drawing me into these characters' heads.
Pawlikowski's past documentary work seems to have enhanced his ability to direct actors. There are some scenes, particularly the ones focused on Tamsin, where more exposition is conveyed through a natural gesture or facial expression than could've been with ten pages of dialog. As with the other players, Emily Blunt takes what could've been a callous rich-girl stereotype and brings a humanity and understanding to her character that makes it hard to hate her. I'm not going into too much detail about Tamsin, because I don't want to completely spoil the film.
The sound and picture quality on the DVD are excellent. The only real special feature is director commentary, which I unfortunately didn't get a chance to listen to. The other features are a few trailers, and an ad for the soundtrack CD, which looks pretty good -- Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory's score is both wondrous and strange, their beguiling, distracting 21st-century noir visions remind me a lot of the song "Not Yet Remembered" from Harold Budd and Brian Eno's album "Plataeux of Mirrors."
If you want to see another well-made film dealing with similar subject matter but with a more upbeat ending, check out Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's "Show Me Love." It's as deserving of your attention as "My Summer of Love" or "Heavenly Creatures."
Movie Review: "Have you read Nietzsche?"
Summary: 4 Stars
My Summer of Love is a bleak, yet absolutely lovely look at girl love, set in an industrial, picturesque Yorkshire village. It's a sweaty, sticky, and unusually hot summer when two young women at loose and lonely ends meet by chance and form an intense attachment that's destined to bring out hidden powers and vulnerabilities in both of them.
The working class Mona (Natalie Press) lives with her older brother Phil (a terrific Paddy Considine). Phil has just been released from prison and has found old time religion. Now he's on a mission to "bring love to this valley," and stamp out all the evil that he thinks exists there. He holds payer meetings for impressionable locals in the pub his parents used to run and spends his spare time building an enormous crucifix out of scrap metal.
Mona laments the loss of her brother to religion and is basically left to her own devices when one day, after riding aimlessly around the hills on her motor-less moped, she has a vision of a dark-haired girl riding a white horse. The girl turns out to be quite real, a cool enigmatic beauty called Tamsin (Emily Blunt). From a wealthy family, Tamsin is whiling away the boarding school vacation in her parent's sprawling stone manor house.
Out of a mixture of boredom, curiosity and perhaps a bit of mutual loneliness, the two girls start spending time together. Their relationship moves from the sisterly to the sexual and beyond, into the kind of feverish, all-consuming intimacy that makes everything else seem insubstantial and slight.
But there's a gaping social divide between this unlikely pair. The uneducated Mona speaks with a stiff accent, highlighting her working class, midlands roots, and when Tamsin invites Mona into her opulent home and plays the cello for her entranced new friend, identifying the music as Saint-Saëns' The Swan, Mona eagerly responds that she lives above The Swan, a rundown pub. Tamsin talks about Nietzsche and Freud and worships the memory of her equally glamorous older sister who she says died of anorexia.
With her parents away, Tamsin urges Mona to stay. They talk and kiss and swear eternal commitment as friends. This leads to tentative explorations of their sexuality. Tamsin at first appears stronger than Mona, and they embark on adventures of revenge against Tamsin's cheating father and Mona's faithless boyfriend.
The reason this film works so well is the fact that director, Pawel Pawlikowski, can elicit three strong, subtle, and intuitive performances from his principal actors. Mr. Considine plays a man whose inner torment is barely contained by his newfound spiritual discipline. He is a bad guy constantly living on the edge, trying to contain his own capacity for violence and rottenness, and in the process, suppressing his capacity for a genuine connection with Mona and to a lesser extent with Tamsin.
But it is Blunt's Tamsin, who in some ways is far more dangerous; she's well educated and spoiled, and is clearly the most interested in power, and is the most skilled at manipulation. She uses her "class" to laud it over Mona in sinister and dangerous ways. While Mona, for her part is seduced by the beauty of her young friend's world and buys into her pretentious visions of nihilism and godless doom. Brother Phil's attempts to fight his own violent nature are under constant threat, and as the three begin to pull each other in separation directions, this "summer of love" comes apart at the seams.
There's lots' going on in My Summer of Love. It's a simple story, yet thematically it's deceptively complex. The passage of youth, the conflicts of faith and fantasy, the differences of class, the potency of the northern English landscape - and also, of course, the collision of sex and religion, are all effectively woven into the story. But the film has a terrific sense of humor, which the young actresses exploit delightfully: The scenes in which Mona reprises the devil's voice from The Exorcist are absolutely priceless.
My Summer of Love is also a triumph of mood and of allusion, with Mr. Pawlikowski almost able to turn the English countryside, and even the sunlight into an active, nearly physical presence. The movie is not just about the innocence of young love, but also about the tender, devoted, and vicious powers that we can sometimes bring out in each other, for better and for worse. Mike Leonard October 05.
Movie Review: That Summer
Summary: 4 Stars
My Summer of Love (2004) is an independent British film directed by Pawel Pawlikovski which tells about two 16-year-old girls from different worlds, social groups and interests, who met one warm and sunny summer (and this happens in England) in idyllic rural Yorkshire. Mona (Natalie Press), a redhead with freckles lives in a small provincial town, comes from a working family, rides a scooter with no motor and lives with her older brother Phil (Paddy Considine - as always convincing and pleasure to watch, although his role is rather thankless and the least interesting). Phil recently returned from prison, where he became a Born Again Christian. Upon his return, Phil rebuilt the pub, which he and Mona inherited from their mother into a house of worship. Natalie Press is simply delightful as Mona. She is impulsive, trusting, cynical and lonely, tired and bored with poverty and dead end existence. She is not well educated but is observant and has no illusions regarding what future has in store for her. After this role, Press continues to appear in British independent films. The most notable and interesting - "Night Watch" (2008) by Peter Greenaway. The second girl, Tamsin - thin, slim, dark-haired student of the prestigious private school, where she had a negative impact on classmates, is the daughter of wealthy parents who are never home. She is well-read, speaks the proper literary language, adores Edith Piaf and cites the well-known philosophers. She is ironic and terribly bored in her parents' suburban castle, where she spends the summer. One day while riding the horse, she meets a funny freckled girl with unruly mane of red hair. Emily Blunt was 21 when she played 16 years old charming manipulator Tamsin. In two years after My Summer of Love, Blunt practically stole all her scenes in the blockbuster "The Devil Wears Prada" from Hollywood more famous actress Anne Hathaway. The role of Tamsin did not make Emily Blunt an overnight star but it without doubt signaled of her promising future in acting.
As different as they are, Tamsin and Mona shared one thing - loneliness, and they become fast friends with Mona staying overnight at Tamsin's house and spending all days together. The relationship progressed from the mutual interest to friendship to to the intimacy when the girls become un-separated and sexually attracted to each other. Soon they promised never ever separate and be always together. It seemed that summer and their love would never end but as it is often the case, one loves without reservation truly and deeply, and the other takes the love and devotion for granted. I read some comments from the viewers rather disappointed with the ending. I personally found it quite logical and the only possible resolution or the Summer of Love. The film is short and lasts less than one and a half hours but during this time we have an opportunity to learn about heroines, to understand their motivations, longings and the reasons behind their actions. My Summer of Love is an interesting psychological drama, which explores the yearning of young souls and bodies, their desires and interests, and sadly concludes that after summer always comes autumn, time to return to the decadent temptations of a big city and to the boredom of provincial stalemate existence. Love, or however you would call the strong and mutual attraction that brought the girls together, would be replaced by bitter disappointment and shattered dreams. According to many interviews with the film writer/director, Pawel Pawlikowski, he did not try to make a film about typical teenage life in England, he wanted to give it a certain "timeless feeling". I think he succeeded in his intentions. The film takes place in Yorkshire, England in the 80s or was it the 70s? There are no computers, cell phones or iPods in sight, so, this story could happen any time at any place. It is honest, convincing, and engrossing. Both young actresses deserved and shared an Evening Standard British Film award for Most Promising Newcomer. BAFTA awarded the film with the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film in 2005.
Movie Review: lyrical offbeat romance
Summary: 4 Stars
Based on the novel by Helen Cross, the British drama "My Summer of Love" tells the story of two troubled teens from opposite sides of the tracks who - as the title pretty much spells out for us - meet one summer and fall in love. Her mother dead and her father long gone from the scene, Mona (Natalie Press) is a simple country girl who lives with her ex-convict, born-again Christian brother who, much to Mona's disgust, has decided to convert the family-owned pub into a meeting place for Pentecostal revivalists. Tamsin (Emily Blunt), on the other hand, hails from a wealthy family, attends a posh boarding school, and studies Nietzsche in her spare time. However, despite all these seeming advantages, Tamsin has also endured her share of tragedy. Her beautiful older sister died of anorexia, her father is a serial adulterer and her mother is a second-rate actress who spends much of her time away from home touring with third-rate acting companies. Lonely, bored and feeling abandoned by those closest to them, Mona and Tamsin turn to each other for companionship and support, finding hope and meaning in a relationship that neither of them can ever truly understand.
Written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, "My Summer of Love" is a fascinating study not only of two complex and interesting characters but of the milieu in which they live. The girls are clearly intended as sympathetic figures - and for the most part that's how they come across - but Pawlikowski is not afraid to show them in a less-than-flattering light when necessary. Tamsin, for instance, has serious issues with honesty, and even though the girls have suffered quite a bit at the hands of unfeeling adults, that still may not justify some of the petty retaliations they take against those to whom they feel superior (Mona's religious zealot brother and his fundamentalist minions) or whom they believe have hurt them in some way (Mona`s married ex-boyfriend, Tamsin`s father`s current girlfriend). This, however, only makes the characters more three-dimensional and believable and helps us to identify with them more strongly. Pawlikowski matches this in the tone of the film, for despite the lyricism of many of the scenes, there is always a hint of darkness and danger lurking just beneath the surface. We never quite know where the story is going because it refuses to follow any type of narrative formula. The portrayal of the born-again Christians does border dangerously on the stereotypical, but their presence in the story provides an intriguing counterpoint to the lesbian love affair at the forefront of the film. It also leads to a visually stunning sequence in which a group of worshippers carry a massive wooden cross to the top of a hill as a way of reclaiming the valley for Jesus.
Press and Blunt are excellent as the two young women at the core of the story, and Paddy Considine ("In America") is equally effective as the brother who loves Mona in his own way but whose new-found religious extremism ironically functions as a wall preventing him from showing that love.
Movie Review: A Very Good Film Exploring Two Teenager's Lives
Summary: 4 Stars
Mona (Nathalie Press) is bored. And disgusted with her brother, Phil (Paddy Considine, "In America", "Cinderella Man"). Phil, just released from prison, returns home having `found God' and transforms the family pub into a revival hall. He starts to have meetings, trying to transform the lives of people in the small Yorkshire town. Mona meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt), the daughter of a wealthy family. They form a friendship, teaching each other about their lives, sharing secrets, exploring together.
"My Summer of Love" is a very good film. Many things about it are fairly ambiguous, peaking your attention. For instance, it isn't immediately clear when the film is taking place. Everything in the little town in Yorkshire, England is slightly old-fashioned. Very few cars are seen. The two girls dress in slightly hippy-ish clothes. No cell-phones, plasma televisions or computers are in evidence. But I don't think it is actually set in the late 60s. I don't think the film is trying to be a period piece. But because it is ambiguous about this, the film gives itself a certain amount of dramatic license, allowing us to believe in the relationship between the two girls.
As the two girls grow closer, they begin to affect each other's lives in ways that are very natural. Each is clearly bored. Tamsin mentions early on that she was expelled from boarding school. She is "a bad influence". Because she is bored, is a bad influence, and has more resources than Mona, she begins to change the life of her friend. First they are friends, sharing laughs and time, and adventures. But as their relationship unfolds, they become closer and share love, declaring that they will never separate.
Mona is a less complex character on the surface. She follows Tamsin's lead, presumably to the ends of the Earth. A captive audience for Tamsin, the stronger personality, Mona follows because she wants to escape her brother's newfound religion. As her character develops, we sense that she is perhaps stronger than she let on, maybe even steering the relationship to meet her needs.
The two girls become lovers, but the film is not about them being Lesbians. It is about the bond they build and share, and how that bond is threatened. Both girls are probably seventeen and they share experiences like any normal teenage girl or boy would share them. With intensity. As if they were the last experiences they were ever to have. With all of their heart.
There is a lot of emotional power in the film. Mona doesn't really believe that her brother has "found God". It is merely another scheme he has come up with. This makes him all the more unbearable to her. Later, when he comes to Tamsin's house to find her, Tamsin tries to seduce him. This is a great scene, providing a lot of depth to all three characters.
"My Summer of Love" is a very good film about two teenagers who share love, heartbreak and more over the course of a single summer.