Set in a so-Yorkshire-you-can-smell-the-tea-and-coal-dust town, in a season of sunshine and, erm, sticky days, My Summer of Love is the latest film to be released by Oxford-based Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski.
The very separated lives of two teenage girls intersect on a bridleway one sunny afternoon. As if to ram home their ‘class’ difference, we see that one girl (‘Tam’) is riding a horse and the other (‘Mona’) is straddling an engineless motorbike that, she awkwardly confesses, ‘was got off some gippo’s for ten quid.’
From this shy and inauspicious beginning blossoms an intimate and completely believable friendship. Both girls have troubles. Tam grieves over the death of her anorexic sister and Mona grieves over the no less upsetting personality-death of her brother, Phil, who has been ‘reborn unto Christ’.
And, for me, it’s the character of Phil (played superbly by Paddy Considine) who holds this film together and deflects it from the cliché-ridden cinematic notion of summer love - which itself probably began and ended with Grease.
An acutely unsettling and foreboding character: Phil, we’re told, has been to prison for what we presume are violent crimes, but now pours away all the alcohol in the pub where Mona and himself lives, holds hourly religious meetings and has a misguided quest to purge evil from the valley in which the town lies.
Drawn by a need to escape both her brother and her restricted circumstances, Mona’s friendship with Tam becomes wilder and unrestrained and the two develop real feelings for each other.
This film not being a product of Hollywood, there are a number of rather savage twists in the tale. The end result is, while not exactly feelgood, more than apt, given the nature of the characters lives.
A compelling and often savagely true film, My Summer of Love has been compared to Oranges are not the only Fruit but for your money has a more playful touch and a greater sense of tragedy.
The very separated lives of two teenage girls intersect on a bridleway one sunny afternoon. As if to ram home their ‘class’ difference, we see that one girl (‘Tam’) is riding a horse and the other (‘Mona’) is straddling an engineless motorbike that, she awkwardly confesses, ‘was got off some gippo’s for ten quid.’
From this shy and inauspicious beginning blossoms an intimate and completely believable friendship. Both girls have troubles. Tam grieves over the death of her anorexic sister and Mona grieves over the no less upsetting personality-death of her brother, Phil, who has been ‘reborn unto Christ’.
And, for me, it’s the character of Phil (played superbly by Paddy Considine) who holds this film together and deflects it from the cliché-ridden cinematic notion of summer love - which itself probably began and ended with Grease.
An acutely unsettling and foreboding character: Phil, we’re told, has been to prison for what we presume are violent crimes, but now pours away all the alcohol in the pub where Mona and himself lives, holds hourly religious meetings and has a misguided quest to purge evil from the valley in which the town lies.
Drawn by a need to escape both her brother and her restricted circumstances, Mona’s friendship with Tam becomes wilder and unrestrained and the two develop real feelings for each other.
This film not being a product of Hollywood, there are a number of rather savage twists in the tale. The end result is, while not exactly feelgood, more than apt, given the nature of the characters lives.
A compelling and often savagely true film, My Summer of Love has been compared to Oranges are not the only Fruit but for your money has a more playful touch and a greater sense of tragedy.