Pawel Pawlikowski (2004)

A hot, sunny day, somewhere in rural Yorkshire; Mona (Natalie Press) lies in a field, dozing; Tamsin (Emily Blunt), passing by, speaks to her.  It’s the beginning of a social-opposites-attract friendship.  Mona rides a rarely functioning scooter, Tamsin her own horse.  She’s home, at her parents’ country pile, for the summer – home early, suspended from her boarding school for disruptive behaviour.  Mona lives with her elder brother, Phil (Paddy Considine), above the village pub owned by their late mother.  The pub’s name is the Swan; ditto the Saint-Saens piece that Tamsin practises, somewhat resentfully, on her cello.  While Phil was behind bars for petty theft and assault, he became a born-again Christian; now he’s getting rid of the pub’s alcohol so that the place can become a spiritual centre for him and his fellow believers in the neighbourhood.  This upsets his sister, who not only finds Phil’s religious awakening ridiculous but misses her mother.  Mona is currently in an entirely loveless sexual relationship, though not for much longer, with Ricky (Dean Andrews), decades older than her, a club singer of sorts.  She and Tamsin are drawn together by a combination of shared boredom and, as they soon discover, physical attraction.

There’s a scene, quite early on in their friendship, where Tamsin has Mona try on different clothes, belonging to Tamsin and her sister, Sadie.  Trying things on is essential to Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love, which the director and Michael Wynne adapted from Helen Cross’s 2001 novel of the same name.  As the two girls sit on a wall outside a house, Tamsin explains, through angry tears, this is where her father (Paul-Anthony Barber) is having it off with his mistress.  In sympathetic response, Mona smashes a window in the car parked outside the house; she and Tamsin then run off together.  Tamsin is even more tearful when she tells Mona that Sadie died of anorexia nervosa.   We’ve no reason to disbelieve what Tamsin says about her family – her distress seems genuine – until she starts telling Mona about Edith Piaf:

‘She was this marvellous Parisian woman – and she had such a wonderful tragic life – and she was married three times – and each husband died in mysterious circumstances – and the last one was a boxing champion and she killed him with a fork – and she didn’t even go to prison because in France crimes of passion are forgiven …’

Those in the audience with a bit of Piaf knowledge now get an idea of Tamsin’s appetite for embroidery and that she’s exploiting Mona’s relative ignorance – although Mona is also sometimes complicit in her friend’s inventions.  After Ricky dumps Mona, the girls turn up at his flat; Mona struggles to keep a straight face as Tamsin informs Ricky’s wife (Michelle Byrne) that Ricky got Mona pregnant and that she has been traumatised by an abortion.  When the wife gets angry and tells the pair to get lost, they oblige at speed.  In the annoying-the-grown-ups stakes, these incidents certainly beat ringing on someone’s doorbell before running away.  Later on, Tamsin and Mona discover magic mushrooms in Sadie’s bedroom, partake of them and turn up, under the influence, at a dance hall where Ricky’s singing.  They interrupt his set; their wobbly, amorous dancing disturbs that of the middle-aged-to-elderly patrons of the place.  These outbursts of bad behaviour work very well because what Tamsin and Mona do is, as well as irritating, funny – and funny largely because it evokes the viewer’s own memories of being stupidly childish.

For her part, Mona tells Tamsin her real name is Lisa; when they were growing up, Phil accused her of always moaning – moaner-Lisa – and the joke name stuck.  There’s no knowing if this is actually true (though the new, serious-minded Phil calls his sister Mona); either way, it doesn’t have the potential ramifications of the stories told by Tamsin that deceive Mona.  As the bond between them strengthens, the girls drink, smoke, swim, kiss and have sex together.  They declare eternal love for each other and swear to a suicide pact should they ever be parted.  Tamsin buys Mona a new engine for her scooter, which they ride around on.  But when, once Phil eventually reverts to type and beats Mona up, she packs a suitcase and heads for Tamsin’s house, she discovers that her soulmate is preparing, under the supervision of her mother (Lynette Edwards), to return to boarding school.  Tamsin admits that she made up the stuff about her father and about Sadie (Kathryn Sumner), who now appears to reclaim the dress that Tamsin told Mona she could keep.

The let’s-pretend theme extends to Phil’s spiritual rebirth.  In a rare visual set piece, Phil leads a ceremony to erect on a local hillside a huge cross that he has built.  (He’s accompanied by rather too many born-again acolytes than is credible in a small rural community but they do turn the ceremony into an even more weirdly impressive spectacle.)   This is in two ways the high point of Phil’s Christian life.  As he leads a prayer meeting, you hear beneath his apparently assured spiel a sense of urgency:  just keep talking and you can shut out the sound of the doubts in your head.  During another such meeting, Mona noisily fakes suicide; Phil, outside her bedroom door, begs to be let in and, in the next breath, begs God, ‘Don’t leave me, Lord’.  He does so, it seems, in all sincerity but he’s fighting a losing battle by now.  When he gets physically violent with Mona (who goads him by pretending to be possessed by a demon), Phil, in a stream of expletives, also evicts the other Christians from the premises.

The trying it on may even extend to the girls’ sexual relationship.  I don’t mean to suggest the lesbianism is just-a-phase-they’re-going-through but, for Tamsin anyway, it’s in the nature of an experiment.  She finds Phil, as well as Mona, attractive, though she evidently despises him, too.  In one of My Summer of Love’s strongest scenes, Tamsin pretends – or half-pretends – to seduce Phil and, when she thinks she has succeeded, mocks him; she’s shocked as he then grasps her round the throat before dismissing her.   The love between them is a different matter for Mona – a matter of life and death.  Betrayed by Tamsin, she returns to the river where they’ve had happy times together, and Tamsin follows.  She derides Mona’s gullibility; Mona, appearing to accept this, invites Tamsin to join her in the river.  She grabs Tamsin and holds her head under the water (the image striking a fine balance between attempted murder and perverted baptism).  Mona eventually releases Tamsin, who gets her breath back enough to yell ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’  Mona makes no reply and walks off alone.

All three main actors give remarkable performances.  This was Emily Blunt’s first cinema film (she’d already appeared on stage and television), made when she was just twenty.  As Tamsin, she’s thoroughly convincing as an entitled user; what’s most striking, though, because of the kind of screen performer she has turned out to be, is Blunt’s amazingly relaxed openness to the camera.  (She’s a consistently strong actress but such relaxation isn’t what you expect from her.)  Paddy Considine gives Phil an uncanny determined quietness that is sometimes affecting but chiefly disturbing.  I was watching the film for the first time twenty years after its original release:  at this distance in time, Natalie Press is bound to stand out partly because, unlike her two co-stars, she hasn’t had starring film roles since My Summer of Love but there’s more to it than that.  Press, who is Emily Blunt’s senior by a few years, makes it intriguingly hard to tell how old Mona is.  Whereas Tamsin is definitely a senior schoolgirl, Mona could be fifteen or she could be twenty-five – and this conveys effectively the aimlessness of her existence.  Pawel Pawlikowski and his cinematographer, Ryszard Lenczewski, do a fine job of capturing the summer beauty and the summer languor of the landscape.  The two men would work together again a decade later on Ida (2013), a film that won Pawlikowski the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  He received a second nomination in that category and a Best Director nomination for Cold War (2018).  For me, neither film is as good as My Summer of Love.

16 May 2024