re:mote voices

Title: My Summer Of Love

Cast: Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine

Director: Pawel Pawlikowsky

Mona lives in a pub, comes across as a bit thick, gets fucked by older men in the back of a car. Tamsin has been suspended from boarding school, lives in the manor house, talks in the most pretentious terms about Nietzsche and Piaf. These are the sorts of impressions we get from these two girls as they meet on the Yorkshire moors. Both at a loose end they form a strange and seductive relationship, one of those slow burning and headily dangerous relationships. Which to a degree defines the idea “my summer of love”. But things aren’t as simple as that – with Mona’s brother Phil complicating matters – driving Mona into the arms of Tamsin and then not being very happy about the results. Phil is just out of prison and has disposed of all the alcohol in pursuit of his born again values – throwing his doors open to the Christian community, and erecting a colossal cross above the valley to drive out evil!

My Summer Of Love is the second feature by the director Pawel Pawlikowsky, his previous Last Resort having been covered here recently. The last time Paddy Considine was mentioned here was in relation to the Shane Meadow’s film Dead Man’s Shoes, which was a repeat collaboration between the two – as is this, with Considine having a similarly key role in Last Resort. My Summer Of Love is probably not that much longer than Last Resort, but it feels like more of a feature film than Last Resort did. Giving more of a chance to wallow in the characters and the sense of space and environment that Pawlikowsky creates with My Summer Of Love. For me, there is a certain comparison to Lynn Ramsey’s adaptation of Morvern Callar, particularly with how the part of Mona seems to be something of a parallel to Morvern. Natalie Press (Mona) and Emily Blunt (Tamsin) make their film debuts with this work, and both really seem to bring their characters live – making the extreme and real differences between the two evident from their first meeting.

My Summer Of Love has a certain light-heartedness and at times a certain ironic humour – particularly at the points where Mona proves that she is actually pretty aware – with a definite undercurrent of darkness and threat entwined around the film’s core.