My Summer of Love
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My Summer of Love (2004) is a British film written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Based on a novel by Helen Cross, My Summer of Love explores the relationship between two young women from different classes and backgrounds. Mona (Press), whose once-hotheaded brother (Considine) became a born-again Christian in prison, meets upper-class Tamsin (Blunt) who suffers from a lack of love in her family. Filmed in West-Yorkshire largely in the beautiful country surroundings of a small town, the film displays a sun-dappled innocence illuminating Mona's relationship with Tamsin. The movie went on to win a BAFTA.
Cast
- Nathalie Press - Mona
- Emily Blunt - Tamsin
- Paddy Considine - Phil
- Dean Andrews - Ricky
- Michelle Byrne - Ricky's wife
- Paul-Anthony Barber - Tamsin's father
- Lynette Edwards - Tamsin's mother
- Kathryn Sumner - Sadie
Plot
Somewhere in Yorkshire with its beautiful countryside a young girl named Mona (Nathalie Press) is found by Tamsin (Emily Blunt) while lying in the grass. Mona is resting there when Tamsin suddenly enters the scenery on a big white horse and two girls with very different backgrounds meet. Mona is the working-class girl with everyday problems teenagers are confronted with. A girl who is bored with her simple life living above an old pub. She is practically an orphan because she never knew her father, her mother died of cancer and her brother Phil (Paddy Considine) has become a religious fanatic. On the other hand Tamsin, the posh upperclass girl is clever, intelligent and manipulating. She has returned home after being suspended from her boarding school - she being a bad influence to the other girls. Mona joins Tamsin on her way home to her mansion. Tamsin riding her beautiful horse and Mona riding her motor-scooter that has no engine.After her first encounter with Tamsin, Mona finds her brother Phil in the old pub that was once run by Mona's mother. He is removing all the alcohol from the pub and he is preparing for a born-again rally. So after a bath and some make-up Mona leaves to meet her lover. They have sex in his car, but when they have finished he tells her that their relationship is over. Mona is disgusted and she is left alone on the parking lot.
The next day Mona escapes the born-again event in her home and she visits Tamsin in her house, arriving to find Tamsin's father leaving in his expensive car. Tamsin is in her room upstairs playing the cello - "the swan" by Saint Saens.The girls talk about their lives and drink a lot of wine together. Together they spend the whole summer day chatting, smoking and drinking wine. Temsin tells Mona that her sister Sadie died of Anorexia. There is a lot of good chemistry between the girls.
The next day Tamsin takes Mona to the place where her father is cheating her mother with his secretary. They smash a window of his car and run away. More and more the two girls feel attracted to each other and Mona spends the night in Tamsin's house. Tamsin's parents are not at home which is not unusual in Tamsin's neglected life. In the morning they leave after breakfast to get Mona an engine for her motor-scooter. Once the engine is installed they drive to a place on a small river in the shade of big trees. There they swim in the fresh water and after having fun they share their first kiss. Later in the night the girls have sex in Tamsin's bed. The next day Phil invites the girls to an event where he wants to put up an extra large cross on the hill next to their village. Tamsin wants to go and so they join the born-again Christians on the way up the hill. When Phil is giving a speech after the cross has been erected, Tamsin feels attracted to him. Later that day Mona and Tamsin trip after consuming magic mushrooms. They go to a dancehall - it is beautiful for them (and us) but their behaviour is disturbing for the other mostly older patrons. They get kicked out by the bouncer and go back to the place at the river and declare their eternal love to each other and swear that they would kill each other in case one leaves the other. They spend the night there.
The morning the girls wake up at the place by the river and Tamsin is feeling cold and sick. So they decide to leave the place for Tamsin's house to have breakfast there. While Mona is playing with a globe and Tamsin is eating an apple Phil arrives at Tamsin's house searching for Mona. Tamsin pretends she wants to seduce him. He reacts and wants to kiss her, but she starts laughing and calls him a fake, in return to which he becomes furious and grabs Tamsin by the neck, implying that he still isn't one to mess with. He forces Mona to go back home with him and locks her in her room, forbidding her to see Tamsin. Mona refuses to give in to his demands and affected by her loyalty to Tamsin he has a change of heart and kicks the born-again Christians out of the former pub. The old Phil is back. Mona leaves the pub with her luggage. She wants to start a new life together with her love Tamsin. But when Mona arrives at Tamsin's things have changed. She is to go back to her boarding school again. As Mona realizes that her plans for a future together are destroyed she then discovers that Tamsin's sister Sadie is not even dead. It was all part of a game Tamsin was playing. Mona is desperate and leaves for the hiding place at the river. There Tamsin finds her and tells Mona that it should have been clear that there is no future for them. They slip into the water fully clothed, re-enacting an earlier scene and kiss each other. But Mona gets violent and it seems as though she will drown Tamsin. But she does not finish it and lets Tamsin go. As Mona leaves abrubtly Tamsin, spluttering, calls her a psycho-bitch, shocked at what just happened. The film ends with Mona walking away, purposeful, determined, almost content despite the betrayal she has just endured.
About the film
When Pawlikowski started to work on the film it took him quite some time casting the two lead actresses. The overall casting procedure took about 8 months. Pawlikowski was searching in schools, universities, theater groups and public castings. He first discovered Nathalie Press's outstanding talent, but he still had to find her counterpart and so held some workshops together with Press and Considine. During this process he finally found Emily Blunt, and felt her to be the ideal Tamsin. The chemistry between Press and Blunt was perfect right from the start and they first did a tryout with the "Piaf-dancing scene", which worked out perfectly. Pawlikowski already knew Paddy Considine, a well known British actor, from their earlier collaboration, Last Resort, and had cast him as Phil.The film was shot during the span of 5 weeks after some intensive location-scouting by Pawlikowski. The script only contained 35 pages and was far from being complete. The whole script was a kind of work in progress. A lot of scenes and dialogue were improvised while shooting, with a lot of participation by the actors. A perfect example for this kind of working method is the scene where Mona draws a portrait of Tamsin on the wall of her room. During Pawlikowski's travelling together with ÃPress, he discovered that she used to do a lot of drawing while she was thinking. So he decided to integrate it into the movie and made a beautiful scene out of it. The whole shoot was done on location in Todmorden during the hottest summer Yorkshire had seen in 50 years.
My Summer of Love is often mistaken as being nothing more than a 'coming of age' movie, or as a film purely focussed on homosexual relationships. There are further themes on display: the character of Tamsin, in particular, presents a façade, and shows how someone's experimental pretense can lead to catastrophic results. Moreover it is a film about the obsessive love between two teenage girls: the naive, honest and full of passion Mona and the dishonest and abusive Tamsin. Both girls have their share of problems: Mona feels increasingly cut off from her newly religious brother, and she feels lonely and bored by her dull teenage life with no hope of a better future, while Tamsin is well educated with rich parents and with a beautiful house to spend her summer in. Tamsin's sense of abandonment from her absent parents has been masked by these rich trappings: her father is cheating on her mother with his secretary and her mother is often away. Just like Mona, Tamsin wants to escape from her constrained life, and together the two girls can flee their realities and experience a dream. Mona enjoys the music, literature and philosophy Tamsin introduces her to, and Mona allows Tamsin to revel in the performance of being someone completely different from her regular life. Tamsin can do things she never could do without Mona, but while Mona naively believes the summer could last forever, Tamsin knows the end will come, and she plays a deadly game with Mona's feelings.
The performances of the leading actors have been widely acclaimed, with trophies from the Evening Standard British Film Awards and the London Critics Circle Film Awards, and Pawlikowski's unconventional style of directing has been rewarded with a BAFTA for Best British Film, the Michael Powell award for Best British Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival (where the film had its world premiere in 2004), along with a slew of nominations across the British Independent Film Awards and the European Film Awards.
- P. Pawlikowski: "Both Natalie and Emily were extremely different and very original, which is a rare thing nowadays. They avoid the obvious, and are capable of playing complex and conflicting attitudes. Above all, they had energy, which is key for a movie. When I brought them together for a workshop, I could see them feeding off of each other well, and I knew that this was going to work." (quote taken from the official homepage http://www.mysummeroflovemovie.com/home.html)
- Tanya Seghatchian (producer): "Pawel has a European sensibility. Whilst he's working with British subject and landscapes, he is much more interested in the essence of things- rather than the usual obsession with class and surface of contemporary life. He has mixture of lyricism and humor and a love of paradox and mystery which set him apart from the rest of British filmmaking, particularly the social realist tradition." (quote taken from the official homepage http://www.mysummeroflovemovie.com/home.html)
- P. Pawlikowski:"[...]If you wanted to make a film about British teenagers it would be... well, it wouldn't interest me, let's put it like that. They'd be listening to music I hate, watching TV all the time, and talking about Big Brother. I needed to remove it, to get to the essence of adolescence without the paraphernalia of today. In a way I am arrested in my adolescent emotions, like most of us I think are, so [the film is] very personal, funnily enough, despite it being about two girls. I identify with Mona to an unhealthy degree [laughs], so the main thing was to make these teenagers the sort of teenagers I could relate to myself, slightly more timeless and removed from now." (quote taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk)
Memorable Quotes
In Tamsin's Mansion's garden Mona and Tamsin sit on a bench and talk about their future lives:
- Tamsin: "So what are you gonna do with your life?"
- Mona: "''I'm gonna be a lawyer...I'm gonna get a job in an abattoir, work really hard, get a boyfriend who's like — a bastard, and churn out all these kids right, with mental problems and then...I'm gonna wait for menopause,...or cancer."
Trivia
- The score of the film was written by Goldfrapp and the movie theme is a variation of the Goldfrapp song "Lovely Head", which is the first song of their 2000 album "Felt Mountain"
- Earlier in his career Pawlikowski did a documentary on born-again Christians in Yorkshire. The experiences he made back then influenced the character Phil (Paddy Considine)
- Emily Blunt plays the cello in her real life. So when Tamsin plays "The swan" by Saint Saens on the cello she does not have to act it. In the credits Blunt is listed as the performer of "The swan" and she clearly played it for the tennis court scene scene, where Mona acts like a dying swan, because it sounds kind of shaky and not like being performed by a professional musician.
External links
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