REVIEWED - MY SUMMER OF LOVE: Polish writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski follows Last Resort, his acute and compassionate 2000 drama of eastern European asylum seekers in England, with another perceptive and absorbing picture of his adopted country in My Summer of Love, which amply fulfils all the promise that earlier film exhibited, writes Michael Dwyer.
This new film is set in rural Yorkshire during the hottest summer in decades - and the coming of age of Mona (Nathalie Press), a bright, perky teenaged girl who lives over a pub with her older brother (Paddy Considine), an ex-convict and born-again Christian.
Just as his life changed dramatically after he found God in jail - he pours all the alcohol down the sink and turns the pub into a venue for prayer meetings - so Mona finds salvation in Tamsin (Emily Blunt), an upper-class girl of her own age. They meet in an idyllic setting, as Mona lies out on the grass in blazing sunshine and Tamsin appears overhead on horseback.
Mona, who never knew her father, misses her mother, who died recently, and she's sexually involved with an adulterous man (Dean Andrews), who clearly is using her. Home from boarding school, Tamsin is equally bored, idling in a mansion whose her actress mother is on tour and her father pursues an affair with another woman.
Telling each other the stories of their lives, and sometimes embroidering them out of immaturity and for dramatic effect, Tamsin and Mona are drawn to each other irresistibly, and their relationship tentatively and tenderly gets physical. In their youthful idealism, the girls are unaware of the track record for summer romances.
Pawlikowski's resolution of the drama prompts a niggling dissatisfaction, one of very few in this heady, lyrical and deeply absorbing picture freely adapted by him and playwright Michael Wynne from Helen Cross's novel. The screenplay updates the setting to the present, jettisons plot elements involving two murders and the miners' strike, and draws on Pawlikowski's experiences when he made a documentary on an evangelist Christian in Yorkshire.
My Summer of Love invokes several earlier screen dramas, notably the fine TV series of Oranges Are the Only Fruit, and Peter Jackson's arresting 1994 Heavenly Creatures. Press and Blunt, both making their feature film débuts, give beautifully judged performances in the central roles.
The intense atmosphere that pervades the film is heightened in the precise visual compositions achieved by Polish lighting cameraman Ryszard Lenczewski, who also worked on Last Resort and more recently in Dublin on Intermission.
