Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love is a tale of betrayal and teenage romance between the classes in the north of England, in this case between the spoiled rich girl Tamsin and the pubkeeper's daughter Mona. The pace is unhurried, and the storytelling is focussed, as the two lovers sunbathe on the hill above their village, or drop mushrooms and crash a ballroom dance hall. The feel of the movie is as much Larry Clark's gritty Kids as it is the 1970's sentimental sun-kissed idyll Friends—and neither of those movies turned out well for their protagonists, either.

Mona (Natalie Press) is a girl who can dream, but is well aware that she's only dreaming: asked what she'll do for a living, she says in the same breath that she'll be a lawyer and then that she'll work in an abbatoir, marry and have lots of children, and spend her life "waiting for menopause... or cancer." Tamsin (the resourceful Emily Blunt) is the sort of person who stirs up trouble because she can, without suffering the consequences—or so she thinks.

Perhaps the movie's ending is more of a resolution for Mona and Tamsin than it is for the narrative itself.

posted: 11:53:52 PM