When Tamsin meets Mona, we’re not entirely certain that she hasn’t happened upon the scene of an accident. Mona lies sprawled in tall grass at the side of the road, her broken-down scooter nearby.
Bestride a white horse, Tamsin looks every bit the knight-errant. Except, of course, she’s got long tresses, beckoning eyes and big hoop earrings.
Who exactly is saving whom is a quandary that runs through “My Summer of Love,” Pawel Pawlikowski’s bewitching tale of affection and alienation set in Yorkshire, England.
Does Tamsin – played with a mix of confidence and subterfuge by Emily Blunt – rescue freckled Mona from her working-class frustrations? routine, Mona had broken up with an affair with a married man.????
| ‘My Summer of Love’
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Or does Mona (Natalie Press in a career-launching feature debut) do some liberating of her own – wrenching boarding school refugee Tamsin from her upper-class boredom?
Not enough salvation for you? Then there’s Mona’s brother Phil (Paddy Considine).
As the film begins, he stands at the bar of the Swan pouring liquor down a drain. The ex-convict has found God. So he’s turning the pub left to him and Mona into a spiritual center.
“It’s just me, my brother and God above the pub,” Mona says. So much of what pops out of her mouth gets said with deadpan matter-of-factness.
As for Tamsin, her precocious poses were clearly forged by privilege and little parental warmth. She plays the cello, pushes Nietzsche and Freud, and praises French songstress Edith Piaf, not for her songs but for her tragic romantic life.
She empathizes with Mona about her parents’ death. Her sister starved herself, she tells Mona with rending attention to the details of death by eating disorder.
Mona and Tamsin nuzzle each other. Then they begin cantering toward trouble.
More than a hint of danger floats over “My Summer of Love.” Which says as much about the edginess of female power as it does about the potential collision of the film’s two vying passions: romantic love and religiosity.
Phil’s righteousness is not without a whiff of peril. Thankfully, Considine helps the film transcend our muddled American debates about such issues by presenting his character’s fervor as the unripened fruit of a difficult struggle.
Strange as it may sound, “My Summer of Love” is deeply funny. Its laughs rumble beneath the languid drama, threatening to crack the surface.
One-time documentarian Pawlikowski gives “My Summer of Love” the hand-held intimacy of a nonfiction film. Yet there’s something unmistakably painterly about the movie. This betwixt-and-between quality makes “My Summer of Love” otherworldly yet very human.
At a time when television series like “Queer As Folk” and “The L Word” embrace homosexuality with pro-sex ardor, “My Summer of Love” may strike some as staid.
Don’t mistake this understatement for repression. “My Summer of Love” is willfully romantic – and just as smart about the dangers in that.
“My Summer of Love”
***½
R for sexuality, language and some drug use|1 hour, 27 minutes|DRAMA| Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski; written by Pawlikowski and Michael Wynne; based on the novel by Helen Cross; photography by Ryszard Lenczewski; starring Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine, Dean Andrews, Michelle Byrne |Opens today at the Esquire.
