Young Lust

It's getting hot out here: Natalie Press as Mona in Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love. Photo Ryszard Lenczewski. Courtesy Odeon Films.

In the uncanny, remarkable British film My Summer of Love, teenaged Mona (Natalie Press) has a freckled face wrapped in the easily ripped onionskin of a redhead. Skin is the only fragile thing about her. She lives with her brother Phil (Paddy Considine) in a small Yorkshire village that looks like a sky vacuum sucked away all the life and colour. Phil is hoping for a little intervention from above, anyway; he found Jesus while doing time and has turned the family pub into a meeting centre for a handful of proselytizing Christians.

Against this bleak backdrop, Mona is enduring the long, hot summer. After being dumped by a grotesque, booty-calling married man — he gets an earful for his bad behaviour — she kills time trawling the burnt-out countryside on a motorbike without a motor. Then, at last, something happens: as Mona lies in the grass, seemingly playing dead, a spectre with long brown hair on a white horse appears above her, tangled in the rays of the sun. The white horse is one of the film’s many fleeting, funny touches; its rider, Tamsin (Emily Blunt), turns out to be a sinister saviour. She’s an upper-class girl on summer vacation from boarding school, and her adult posturing — she serves brandy with her cigarettes; kids will be kids! — finds a willing audience in Mona. “You should read Nietzsche,” she tells her. “You’d like him. Or Freud.” She waxes on about Edith Piaf, covering all the bases of pretentious, maudlin adolescence. Mona listens, ears pricked, but she has a few things to teach Tamsin, too, namely about passion — Mona has no problem putting a garden gnome through the window of a Jaguar if the owner is deserving — and desire, which inevitably, and without fuss, means sex. The two fall into a languorous love affair.

A sense of menace pushes My Summer of Love along the hot, empty corridors of the season. Director Pawel Pawlikowski and his wonderful director of photography Ryszard Lenczewski use the deserted Yorkshire countryside to make it seem as if the girls are the only two left in the world, which is what first love feels like. But it’s an uneasy romance; they are caught in the complicated push and pull of female friendship, a power struggle imbued with respect, lust and anger, all taking turns. One is reminded of Heavenly Creatures, the equally fantastical pre-Hobbit Peter Jackson film about two teenaged girls whose fevered friendship ends in murder. In My Summer of Love, the horror is more hushed; the wider the affair blooms, the more ripe the scent of something amiss. If summer is the season of anticipation — who will I be come September? — this one anticipates only disaster.

Ready for anything: From left, Mona (Natalie Press) and Tamsin (Emily Blunt). Photo Ryszard Lenczewski. Courtesy Odeon Films.

Inscrutable and beautiful, Tamsin is almost spectral; Mona sometimes looks at her like she can’t believe she’s real. The two nest in the giant, parent-free mansion that’s haunted by the ghost of Tamsin’s dead sister. This empty, wasted estate isn’t the only class difference between them. The sister died of anorexia, a disease with undeserved connotations of glamour, while Mona’s mother died of cancer — how ordinary. Perfectly capturing the dramatic tenor of girl friendship, the two borrow stories and agonies from each other, turned on by the exotica of the other half. Mona, with her yanging Yorkshire accent dances through the mansion in Tamsin’s designer clothes while Tamsin edges closer to the tenuous relationship between her lover and Phil. All this time, Tamsin appears to be training for something. She tries out her formidable sexuality wherever she can, and in one uneasy scene, uses it, cruelly, to slice through Phil’s piety.

Paddy Considine makes something huge out of a tiny role. He’s one of those actors who pops up everywhere, most recently as an American in Cinderella Man, and he is such a natural transformer that he can sometimes look very handsome, sometimes very plain. Phil is an unconvincing convert, a former thug with the jagged edges of the newly reformed. He has more in common with Tamsin than with his sister because while Mona is tough, she is quite gentle, too. It’s Tamsin and Phil who emerge as the more natural pair, just barely keeping their real selves in check. While he struggles to tame his bad side, Tamsin is nurturing hers.

The inevitable fracture occurs in the film’s topsy-turvy third act. Usually I recoil at “surprise endings” (just tell me a story, please), but this film’s dénouement works; it provides the kind of revelation that makes you want to go back and re-watch the film from a different angle to see if it is as potent. Doing so would be a great pleasure because it would mean another go-round with the confident performances of these two unknown young actresses. What they show us, so assuredly in this wonderful film, is love’s proximity to something darker, a truth that is not just the province of youth.

My Summer of Love opens Friday July 1 in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.