My Summer of Love (2005)
Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski
In the Yorkshire countryside, working-class tomboy Mona meets the exotic, pampered Tamsin. To seal their friendship, Mona introduces Tamsin to her born-again Christian brother and helps her spy on her adulterous father. Bound together by their secrets, the two girls see their friendship deepen and enter into dangerous waters.
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8 films that influenced My Summer of Love
What critics say influenced My Summer of Love
Akin to 1994's "Heavenly Creatures" without the murder and fantasy sequences -- and with a twist of distrust hanging in the air -- "My Summer of Love" is a squirmy parable about two 17-year-old girls from opposite ends of the social spectrum who find in each other's company a powerful but uneasy release from their individual angst.
There are shades of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures here, as well as echoes of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
In this regard, My Summer of Love calls to mind other recent sapphically inclined coming-of-age films: i.e., Show Me Love, Lost and Delirious, The Dreamlife of Angels, and Heavenly Creatures.
Peter Jackson explored one in his incendiary 1994 "Heavenly Creatures," and now Polish-born British director Pawel Pawlikowski gives us another in the exceptional "My Summer of Love," a film as different from its Sandra Dee teensploitation title as its two protagonists are from each other.
Director Pawel Pawlikowski, whose last film, "Last Resort," was a minor revelation (as well as Paddy Considine's first starring role), has chosen to adapt a novel (by Helen Cross) which demands comparison to "Heavenly Creatures," Peter Jackson's better film from 1994.
An austerely heightened tale of sensual anxiety, My Summer of Love is shot in a gorgeous, saturated handheld style that recalls the Danish Dogmatists but also carries premonitions of perversity and dread that reach back to such Roman Polanski films as Knife in the Water and Cul-de-Sac.
What distinguishes this British import from "A Summer Place'' and other Hollywood tales of impossible first love isn't the lesbianism, which director Pawel Pawlikowski wisely plays down.
There are shades of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures here, as well as echoes of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
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“My Summer of Love” is better than a lot of them, with exceptionally strong performances by the two leads and a sharply wistful tone achieved by director Pawl Pawlikowski — but when you boil it down to its essential elements, it is no different from, say, “Lost and Delirious.”
In this regard, My Summer of Love calls to mind other recent sapphically inclined coming-of-age films: i.e., Show Me Love, Lost and Delirious, The Dreamlife of Angels, and Heavenly Creatures.
In this regard, My Summer of Love calls to mind other recent sapphically inclined coming-of-age films: i.e., Show Me Love, Lost and Delirious, The Dreamlife of Angels, and Heavenly Creatures.
In this regard, My Summer of Love calls to mind other recent sapphically inclined coming-of-age films: i.e., Show Me Love, Lost and Delirious, The Dreamlife of Angels, and Heavenly Creatures.
Which is unfortunate, as Pawel Pawlikowski's first film, "Last Resort," a Kafkaesque tale of a Russian mother and son trapped immigration limbo, was truly remarkable.
Under the unadorned but intensely atmospheric direction of Pawel Pawlikowski (whose similarly visceral "Last Resort" was released in 2001), the inexperienced young actresses give such unaffected performances that the film develops a voyeuristic quality as the girls' relationship takes on the momentum of a runaway train.
In the reflective moments between their giddy bike rides and drunken strolls, they seem happy that they found each other, but there's more at work here, and it's revealed when director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort) slowly, deliberately pulls back to find the bitterness waiting beneath the sunny title.
As his previous feature, 2001's memorable "Last Resort," demonstrated, Pawlikowski is a second-skin filmmaker, someone whose sensitivity to people enables him to truly get inside his characters' private worlds, to know them better than they sometimes know themselves.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s previous film was the critically acclaimed drama Last Resort (which also starred Paddy Considine), back in 2000.
Mona (newcomer Nathalie Press, resembling Toni Collette crossed with Sissy Spacek) takes her motorless scooter out into the Yorkshire countryside to get away from her born again brother Phil (Paddy Considine, "Cinderella Man," "Last Resort"), who's turning their pub into a revival meeting.