My Summer of Love (2004)

My Summer of Love: Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. With Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine, Dean Andrews. In the Yorkshire countryside, working-class tomboy Mona meets the exotic, pampered Tamsin. Over the summer season, the two young women discover they have much to teach one another, and much to explore together.

“Pavel Pavlikovski directed the bleak, austere u0026#39;Last Resortu0026#39;, and was sacked from u0026#39;Sylviau0026#39; on grounds of having an insufficiently commercial sensitivity.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eNow he had made u0026#39;My Summer of Loveu0026#39;, a nicely observed tale of a teenage lesbian romance. As in u0026#39;Last Resortu0026#39;, Russian-born Pavlikovski paints an enticingly skewed picture of Britain that rings true in spite of its aberrence; and gets good performances out of his cast, especially Paddy Considine as the brother of one of the girls, who could certainly have used more screen-time, though his co-stars Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt are also good. The film steers clear of cliché, and has some dryly funny dialogue, but what it lacks is a sense of time as a continuum: it feels like a semi-random sampling of its charactersu0026#39; lives, and although there is a clear plot itu0026#39;s hidden in the background, apparent only later. In some ways, this is also true to life, but it also means that the film remains low-key right up to the moment of its suddenly dramatic conclusion. Pavlikovski also seems surprisingly keen on static location shots (before we see the characters inside of a house, we always see the house from outside),u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003ewhich jars slightly given the filmu0026#39;s general artistic merits. Distinctive, and well-worth watching, u0026#39;My Summer of Loveu0026#39; isnu0026#39;t quite a great film; but it is an interesting effort from a director committed to representing life in the ways that Hollywood never does.”