Pleased to finally get to see ‘My Summer of Love’ (2004) which was directed by Pawel Pawlikowski and recently featured on the Observer’s list of the best British films of the last 25 years.
It’s a fine movie that works mainly because of the perfect casting of Natalie Pressna as Mona and Emily Blunt as Tamsin. There’s a real chemistry between these two that draws you into the story immediately.
Freely adapted from a novel by Helen Cross, the movie tells the story of these two isolated young women from different social backgrounds who meet by chance and become friends and lovers.
Tamlin is a fantasist, cellist and atheist from a wealthy family. She’s been suspended from boarding school for being a bad influence on others.
Mona’s mother is dead and she doesn’t know her father, so she lives with her brother who has found God (“or God found him”) while in prison. “He went inside, but came out funny” she says.
While the brother’s crusade to rid the small northern village of sin is a key aspect of the story, it is intense friendship between the women that lies at the movie’s heart . Their relationship is a failed attempt to live an existential existence beyond good and evil (Tamlin has read her Nietzsche!).
That freedom has its limits, is something the more streetwise Mona understands more readily than her supposedly more educated lover. Asked by Tamlin what she plans to do with her life Mona at first jokes that she’ll become a lawyer, then gives an altogether bleaker outlook : “I’m gonna get a job in an abattoir – work really hard – get a boyfriend who’s a bastard – churn out all these kids with mental problems and I’m gonna wait for the menopause ……….or cancer”.
For all her apparent learning and haughty detachment, Tamlin is unable to face up to reality in such stark terms. While Mona seems the weaker and more impressionable of the two, it is she who ultimately seems to be the most clear minded and purposeful.
The hint of optimism of the end of the movie comes from the feeling that she at least has the courage and wits to make something of her life.
