My Summer of Love
rated PG-13

Fresh-faced Mona (Nathalie Press), collapsed in a field on a summer day, opens her eyes to see a beautiful girl above her on a white horse. Anyone blinded by such a vision is surely fated also to be slave to its power, and so it is in My Summer of Love, a Heavenly Creatures-ish coming-of-age story, in which the menace lurks below the surface, working its way out through swelling passions more than actual violence.

Tamsin (Emily Blunt), recently suspended from boarding school, actually does rescue Mona from her going-nowhere life in the English countryside. Mona lives at The Swan, a pub formerly run by her deceased mother and which is now being transformed into a spiritual center by her brother Phil (Paddy Considine), who’s been obsessed with God since his last stay in jail (for robbery, burglary, fightin’, Mona explains to Tamsin in her heavy accent).

The two marooned emotional outsiders rapidly entwine themselves as naturally as sisters and hide away at Tamsin’s family estate while Tamsin’s father is off to town on business and her mother is away acting. Over bottles of wine and the music of Edith Piaf, they open door after door to their souls. The rich but emotionally adrift Tamsin leads the way intellectually and culturally, but Mona’s restless spirit sets the pace.

Mona and Tamsin are, in fact, nearly the only two characters in the story, and they are an unforgettably disarming pair. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, in only his second feature film, adeptly captures the fevered pitch as they rush headlong from crush to consuming obsession. What could be cliché or corny—first love, lesbian first love—is instead shaped by askew camera angles that frame people close-up or off center, capturing breath and gaze, intensity and humor.

Dressed in clothes that are fabulously pink against a backdrop of green ivy or a green forest or the grayed town, the girls are fresh as flower petals but no delicate blossoms. Everything here is about risk, surrender, throwing oneself off the cliff, knowing that nothing more can be asked of you thereafter. As might be expected in a small town in the north of England, no major dramas erupt over the summer; there’s simply this exploration, a long meander through the outskirts of adulthood, until a series of escalating betrayals reveals the truth: there’s always something at stake in this game.