Early on, the two teenage girls at the heart of the film meet for the first time. Tamsin (Emily Blunt), the spoiled rich kid, is out riding her horse on the moors when she happens upon Mona (Natalie Press), her social opposite. Mona is lying next to her mode of transport, a moped without an engine that she picked up for a tenner. Only a few words are exchanged but the scene fixes key things about their background and the kind of relationship they are likely to have. The self-dramatising (and finally manipulative and unreliable) Tamsin will dominate. And Mona, to whom life has already been a bleak and punishing experience, should be wary. She shouldn’t expect good times to last.

Tamsin and Mona’s lives are in their faces (great casting). Tamsin is healthy, and lovely, and looks after her appearance. Mona’s face is a little pinched, and she already has faint lines around the mouth. Tamsin will look great at forty. Mona will be lucky if she makes it that far.

Mona pays a visit to Tamsin’s socking great family home with its own tennis court, they become friends, and a summer romance develops. They need each other. Mona’s only family is her unreliable brother Phil. Tamsin’s father is too busy adding to the family fortune and shagging his secretary to notice her, and her mother is absent, off touring in a play.

The girls drink a lot of booze together and reflect on life. They dance to affecting music sung in passionate foreign tongues. They frolic in an icy pool in the woods. If I make this sound a bit tacky it’s not because it was but because it easily could have been. There was a lot of potential for Pawlikowski to have got the relationship between the girls wrong. It could have been deeply sentimental, it could have been highly indulgent visually and emotionally, it could have been voyeuristic. But it wasn’t. Tamsin and Mona’s relationship is doomed from the word go, it’s only a summer of love, but while it’s happening it feels real. Emily Blunt and Natalie Press are intense and open in the more intimate scenes they play together.

Pawlikowski takes the lives of the characters in his films seriously, but the camera doesn’t get involved in the relationship too much. Often it seems to observe, to show what’s going on, to record. This is the discipline of a filmmaker who cut his teeth in documentaries, and it helps keep mawkishness or sentimentality away. Plus Pawlikowski’s preference is to keep the momentum going, to cut and move on rather than linger and overdo and effect.

The same thoughtful restraint is at work most of the time in the treatment of Mona’s flaky brother, Phil, and his circle. Phil has a history of violence against the person and general thieving. While in prison he found God, and now released he’s trying to live a good life. No thieving. No hitting people. No fornication. Instead, a lot of praying. Mona quite liked the old Phil, and struggles to come to relate to the new one. You can see her point of view. We first see Phil pouring down the sink all the remaining booze in what was the family pub. Then he turns the place – Mona’s home as well as his – into a kind of drop in prayer centre for his new bible-bashing acquaintances. As a viewer you’re pretty sure from the start that Phil is not going to stay the course, and his old – true? – self will out. He’s accused of being a fraud by his sister and in the end Tamsin sets him up and he is all too easily seduced by the temptation of her flesh.

It’s possible to say that Phil is just a fraud and is engaged in an exercise in power and manipulation. But the Pawlikowski doesn’t really go down that road with any conviction. There’s no satire or mockery in his treatment. He’s interested in revealing characters’ humanity, not taking the piss. Paddy Considine (who was also in ‘Last Resort’) plays Phil as a man struggling with his demons, and the camera follows and frames this process. A good example of what I’m talking about is the fact that when he finally loses the battle with himself and bashes Mona to the floor and boots her in the stomach, the camera bears witness to the act, but it doesn’t make nearly as much of a meal of it as it could have done.

The same kind of curious, but restrained camera follows Phil and the rest of the faithful as they haul the enormous great cross Phil has made up the hill that overlooks their Pennine village. They carry the cross to the top of the hill and plant it there as a reproach to the ungodly below. And what you see as a viewer, the feel of this part of the film, is close to documentary.

If like me you enjoy being tickled in a film, you’ll be pleased to know that ‘My Summer Of Love’ is very funny in parts. Early on we briefly see Mona in the back of a car having sex with the muscle bound primitive of a married man she’s seeing. Sex over, he dumps her. Later Mona simulates his simulates his back-to-basics sexual technique on Tamsin:

A few thrusts.
Boyfriend: Oh, you’re so small.
A few more thrusts.
Boyfriend: Turn over.
Mona turns over. A few more thrusts
Boyfriend: Oh, I’ve come.
Brief pause.
Boyfriend: Where are my cigarettes?

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Alan Ram lives in East Yorkshire and is more than fifty. His short plays have been produced by the National Theatre in Kenya, the Workshop Theatre in Leeds. He has been writing fiction since his early 20’s and has had several stories published in magazines including Liar Republic and Front and Centre. Previous jobs include pulling pints, carrying a hod, sweeping floors in a mental hospital, teaching kids, teaching adults, generating publicity for a charity, management consulting, copywriting, freelance journalism, cleaning carpets, selling carpets... He is currently completing his first novel. To read a selection of his short stories on the Showcase section of this website, click here

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© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.