Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish-born documentarist now based in Britain, made an impression four years ago with his feature film, Last Resort. Its urgent subject was the way we treat immigrants and asylum seekers and it took a despairing view of their plight. His new film, My Summer of Love, seemingly turns away from pressing topical concerns, the title suggesting a romantic idyll which in some sense it is.
At the centre are two teenage girls, the middle-class, boarding school-educated Tamsin (Emily Blunt), and the working-class Mona (Nathalie Press), who meet one hot summer's day in the fields outside a small Yorkshire town.
This opening is pastoral, bucolic. Mona, a pale, freckled redhead with a certain resemblance to the young Tilda Swinton, is lying in the faded grass, beside the red Honda motorbike she's just bought. It cost £10 because it does not have an engine. She looks up at the sky which, in its flat whiteness, resembles the sur face of a lake. Suddenly above her rears a horse and Pawlikowski cuts between close-ups of her left eye and the enormous right eye of the horse. Confidently riding the horse is the beautiful, dark-haired Tamsin. From this casual encounter an intense friendship develops.
The setting is almost abstract, an unnamed town in a narrow valley through which a train passes on an embankment above the streets but never stops. Tamsin lives in a secluded, ivy-covered mansion with her father, a remote figure, rarely seen, who drives a maroon Jaguar. Her sister, she explains, has died of anorexia and her mother is an actress on tour. Mona, an orphan, lives in a cluttered room above a pub that has been closed down by her older brother, Phil (Paddy Considine). He's a violent ex-criminal who has become a born-again Christian in jail and uses the ground floor as a meeting place for his devout circle.
Tamsin is a gifted cello player, self-consciously sophisticated, urging Mona to understand the world by reading Nietzsche and Freud and proclaims that Edith Piaf 'had such a wonderfully tragic life'. She's manipulative and a self-confessed fantasist. Mona, on the other hand, is a forthright girl with a cheeky sense of humour (she does a splendid impersonation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist), a strong local accent and no experience of life beyond this small community.
Her romantic yearnings are tempered by a knowledge that ahead of her is a predictable future leading up to menopause and death. Both girls seem alienated from their families and backgrounds and each provides things the other needs. Tamsin buys an engine for Mona's Honda so they can go on jaunts together.
The relationship suggests two very different works about class, alienation, and destructive passion - Jean Genet's The Maids and LP Hartley's The Go-Between. Their friendship develops into love of both a spiritual and physical kind - first a kiss while swimming in a brook on the moors, then a more passionate embrace on a neglected grass tennis court and finally full consummation. This escalation is handled with tenderness and subtlety.
A tough humour informs the accompanying folie à deux by which the pair exact cruel comic revenge on Tamsin's father for his adulterous liaison and on Mona's brutal married lover for having deserted her. They then turn on Mona's brother, Phil, to expose the supposed hypocrisy that has led him and his followers to erect a giant cross on a hill above the town, announcing their mission to save its benighted citizens.
My Summer of Love has a characteristically dangerous performance from Paddy Considine and remarkable performances from Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt, who bring a wonderful naturalness and conviction to Mona and Tamsin. They recall the striking debuts of Samantha Morton and Emily Watson in the 1990s. The picture is conventionally resolved, though not unsatisfactorily, and is oddly mysterious in its tone and thrust.
Is it a psychological drama involving social and sexual rites of passage? Or is the film a kind of allegory about the impossibility of sustaining the emotional intensity necessary to break away from the moral numbness of contemporary Britain?
