Beyond the Multiplex

"My Summer of Love": Two girls, a born-again brother, a broken moped and a waterfall

I've had a hard time explaining to people what makes "My Summer of Love" so compelling. OK, on one level, what's to explain? It's a movie about an intense, overheated friendship between two beautiful young women, set in an oddly beautiful corner of rural England. And if you're wondering whether I mean what you think I mean by "intense" and "overheated," the answer is yes. Its stars, Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, are film newcomers who give startling performances. The photography is often breathtakingly original and the countryside of west Yorkshire looks lush, almost exotic.

Still, until I had writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski on the phone, I hadn't pinned down how intensely and meticulously crafted this movie is. He talked to me about the kinds of films that shaped his sensibility -- "Taxi Driver" and the early films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders and the Polish films he watched as a kid (like Andrzej Wajda's great "Ashes and Diamonds") -- films that create a world entire unto themselves, and make you feel like a different person when you leave the theater.

"My Summer of Love" has more than a little of that feeling. In many ways, it's a familiar tale, one about opposites attracting. Tamsin (Blunt) is a sleek, spoiled, horse-riding rich girl who lives with her parents -- whom we hardly ever see -- in a big ivy-covered house. Out on a ride one day, she comes upon Mona (Press), a redheaded, working-class tomboy who lives above a pub, lying in the grass next to her moped (which has no engine). What follows is on one hand a story of deepening erotic fascination, and on the other just an ordinary tale of two bored girls from dramatically different backgrounds killing time one summer.

That's about it, really. Tamsin tells Mona about Nietzsche; Mona tells Tamsin that she, Mona, will likely wind up working in an abattoir, pumping out kids with "a real bastard" of a boyfriend, and "waiting for menopause -- or cancer." They go swimming, they dance to Edith Piaf, they wander the woods, they try to raise the spirit of Tamsin's dead sister, they go to bed together, they betray each other. They torment the only other real character, Mona's older brother, a born-again ex-con (Paddy Considine) who has turned the pub into a spiritual center to bring Jesus back to their forsaken Yorkshire valley.

Pawlikowski's method, as he explains it, is to focus almost exclusively on characters and landscape, and strip the film's "information" down to essentials. There are no news events, no posters on the walls, no pop songs on the radio. From the cars and clothes, you'd be hard-pressed to say whether this movie was set in 1985 or 2005. It's contemporary in style and setting, but more archetypal than realistic. It's also a seductive moviegoing experience that embraces you in its sensuous cocoon, and it's not to be missed.

British critics still refer to Pawlikowski as a Polish filmmaker, even though he came to England as a teenager in the 1970s and has lived there ever since. If that tells you something about abiding British xenophobia, it also tells you something about Pawlikowski. "I have no excuse for my accent," he told me. Maybe not, but it befits his adopted role as British cinema's permanent outsider.

You've talked a lot about wanting to avoid making a stereotypically British film. What do you mean by that?

In this case, I meant not wanting to make a film that was obviously sociological, that shows a well-defined social life on the estates [housing projects] or wherever. You know, one of these social-realist films that they make here. Very often, it's middle-class directors making films about working-class people. It's like a theme park. The camera is hand-held and everyone's very angry and swears a lot.

Yeah. Basically, you're talking about Ken Loach.

Well, yeah. But he has made wonderful films. He's not the problem. It's the easiest way of inventing a story without a lot of money. There's a lot of people churning it out, and you don't quite know who it's for. Visually those films are kind of dead as well. It's always the same vocabulary, sort of pseudo-documentary.

In some sense, though, isn't "My Summer of Love" partly about class? These two girls come from completely different worlds, and that's the source of a lot of the drama between them.

Definitely it's about class. Class is so embedded you don't even have to draw attention to it. It's embedded in the psychology of the characters, therefore it's not obtrusive. It's another dramatic layer, one of the layers of the relationship.

Next Page: The work of a dirty old man?

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