My Summer of Love
Issue #24
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 3:31pm
One of the many sly jokes underscoring My Summer of Love is that it’s set in Yorkshire. Yorkshire is associated with many things — perpetual rain, chapped lips, muddy Wellingtons — but pulsating eroticism and an unabashed lesbian desire are not among them.
Cathy may have longed for Heathcliff, but chances are they never sunbathed topless or enjoyed a heady, shroom-fueled make-out session by a babbling brook. So it’s a pleasurable jolt to view the region through the lens of director Pawel Pawlikowski, bathed in super-saturated color and humming with ripe humidity. It’s a perfect backdrop, in other words, for Mona (Nathalie Press) to meet Tamsin (Emily Blunt). Mona is a local girl who lives with her ex-con-turned-born-again brother, Phil (Paddy Considine), in their family’s pub, which Phil is converting into a meeting place for his prayer group.
Tamsin, for her part, is the spoiled, neglected daughter of a rich banker and an actress, and is given to quoting Nietzsche and projecting her glamorous ennui with the subtlety of a klieg light. After their chance first encounter, the two girls embark on an impetuous, slyly passionate relationship that is as sensual and oppressive as the summer heat. They spend much of their time in Tamsin’s sprawling, lonely country mansion, eating croissants in bed, trying on the clothes of Tamsin’s lamented older sister — who, Tamsin says, died of anorexia — and waltzing to Piaf. When their relationship turns physical, it does so in a frank, unabashed way, with none of the navel-gazing, overblown soul-searching that too often accompanies first- and same-sex love stories.
It’s this refusal to adhere to genre limitations that makes My Summer of Love such an odd and thrilling work. It wanders into territory previously explored in the likes of Me Without You,Heavenly Creatures,Morvern Callar, and even Brideshead Revisited — and then retreats just as effortlessly into places that few filmmakers are able to reach.
Discovery — both of love and of oneself — may be nothing new, but as interpreted by Pawlikowski and his talented cast, it has the heady, dizzying allure of an uncharted frontier.
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