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My Summer of Love

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My Summer of Love
Theatrical release poster
Directed byPaweł Pawlikowski
Screenplay byPaweł Pawlikowski
Michael Wynne
Based onMy Summer of Love
by Helen Cross
Produced byChris Collins
Tanya Seghatchian
StarringNatalie Press
Emily Blunt
Paddy Considine
CinematographyRyszard Lenczewski
Edited byDavid Charap
Music byAlison Goldfrapp
Will Gregory
Distributed byContentFilm
Release dates
  • 21 August 2004 (2004-08-21) (EIFF)
  • 5 November 2004 (2004-11-05) (United Kingdom)
Running time
86 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Box office£5 million[1]

My Summer of Love is a 2004 British drama film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and co-written by Pawlikowski and Michael Wynne. Based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Helen Cross, the film explores the romantic relationship between two young women from different classes and backgrounds. Working class Mona (Natalie Press), whose once-hotheaded brother Phil (Paddy Considine) became a born-again Christian in prison, meets upper middle class Tamsin (Emily Blunt, in her theatrical film debut) who suffers from a lack of love in her family. Filmed in West Yorkshire, the film went on to win a BAFTA.

Plot

In Yorkshire, Mona (Natalie Press) is lying in a field when Tamsin (Emily Blunt) passes by on her horse. Tamsin is from a wealthy family and says she has been suspended from boarding school. Mona comes from a working-class family, and her only living relative is her brother Phil (Paddy Considine). Both girls seem to regard their lives as mundane.

Mona finds Phil getting rid of all the alcohol in their late mother's former pub. After going to prison for petty theft and violence, he has undergone a religious transformation and is now planning a Christian rally. Mona meets her lover, Ricky (Dean Andrews), for sex in his car, but he breaks up with her afterward. The next day, the girls begin to bond as they spend the day drinking, smoking and talking about their problems. The next day, Tamsin takes Mona to the house where Tamsin claims her father's mistress lives. Mona smashes a window of Tamsin's father's car.

Tamsin purchases an engine for Mona's scooter, and they drive to a small river to swim. Under a waterfall, the girls share a kiss. At Tamsin's house, Mona tries on her dresses. Tamsin tearfully recounts the death from anorexia of her sister Sadie. In the garden, Tamsin plays the cello while Mona dances. Tamsin kisses Mona passionately, and they later have sex, but they are interrupted when Phil comes to the house looking for Mona.

Phil wants Mona to come to his rally, and Tamsin comes along. They join the Christians to erect a cross on a hill. Tamsin seems to be attracted to Phil. At Tamsin's house, she and Mona enter Sadie's room, where they find a bag of magic mushrooms. They take the mushrooms and go to a dance hall, where they disturb the patrons. They return to the river and declare their eternal love to each other, swearing a suicide pact should they ever be separated.

Phil comes to Tamsin's house seeking Mona again, and Tamsin lets him in and pretends to seduce him, but switches to mocking him, and he reacts in anger. When Mona returns home, Phil locks her in her room. Mona fakes suicide and then mocks Phil's religious beliefs. Reverting to his old anger, Phil kicks out the Christians, while Mona packs a suitcase and leaves to be with Tamsin.

When she arrives at Tamsin's house, Mona discovers that Tamsin is returning to boarding school. Mona also finds out that Tamsin lied about her parents and that her sister Sadie is still alive. Dejected, Mona goes to the river. Tamsin joins her there, and dismissively tells Mona she should have known Tamsin was lying. Seemingly forgiving her, Mona slips into the water, enticing Tamsin to join her, and the two girls kiss again. Mona grabs Tamsin by the throat and pushes her under the water, as if to kill her. Instead, Mona releases Tamsin and walks away.

Cast

Production

Casting the two lead actresses for the film proved difficult for Pawlikowski, and the overall casting procedure took about eight months. Pawlikowski searched in schools, universities, theatre groups and public castings. He discovered Natalie Press first, and sought her counterpart by holding 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, and they first did a tryout with the "Pavlova-dancing scene", which worked out perfectly. Emily Blunt is a competent cellist, and is listed in the credits as the performer of "The Swan" by Camille Saint-Saëns. Pawlikowski already knew Paddy Considine from their earlier collaboration Last Resort and cast him as Phil.

The film was shot during the span of five weeks after intensive location-scouting by Pawlikowski. The script only contained 35 pages and was incomplete. Many scenes were improvised while shooting. The scene in which Mona draws a portrait of Tamsin on the wall of her room was entirely improvised—during Pawlikowski's traveling together with Press, 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 scene out of it. The whole shoot was done on location in Todmorden during the hottest summer Yorkshire had seen in 50 years.[citation needed]

The score of the film was written by Goldfrapp and the movie theme is a variation of the Goldfrapp song "Lovely Head", the first single from their 2000 album Felt Mountain.

The performances of the leading actresses have been acclaimed, with awards from the Evening Standard British Film Awards and the London Critics Circle Film Awards. Additionally, Pawlikowski's unconventional style of directing has been rewarded with a BAFTA for Best British Film and the Michael Powell award for Best British Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival (where the film had its world premiere in 2004), along with many nominations across the British Independent Film Awards and the European Film Awards.

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.

— Pawel Pawlikowski[2]

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.

— Tanya Seghatchian[2]

The novel of the same title, My Summer of Love by Helen Cross, only served as a blueprint for the film. Whereas the novel pays a lot of attention to the social background of England in the 1980s, Pawlikowski focused on the relationship between the girls. Most of the characters in the novel were left out in the film and the character Phil was invented and added by Pawlikowski, who had previously directed a documentary on born-again Christians in Yorkshire. In many interviews Pawlikowski said that he was not interested in portraying typical teenage life in England, but he wanted to give the movie a certain "timeless feeling".

[...]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.

— Pawel Pawlikowski[citation needed]

Release

My Summer of Love was first screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, being released across the UK on 5 November 2004. In the US, the film was initially screened at the Seattle International Film Festival on 20 May 2005, being eventually given a limited released across the US on 17 June 2005.[3]

Box office

In the US, the film grossed $90,000 on its opening weekend, in 17 theaters; and went on to be released across 63 theaters, grossing a total $1,000,915 in the 8 weeks of its release.[1] Worldwide, it grossed an additional $1,766,061, for a lifetime gross of $2,766,976.[1]

Critical reception

The film was met with acclaim from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes it has a "Certified Fresh" approval rating of 90% based on reviews from 90 critics, with an average rating of 7.45/10. The website's critical consensus states: "My Summer of Love is a moody, bittersweet love story featuring outstanding performances from the leads."[4] On Metacritic it has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100 based on 31 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[5]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who gave it 3/4 stars, described it as "a movie that is more about being an age, than coming-of-age" and appreciated Pawlikowski's pacing of the film.[6] The New York Times's A.O. Scott termed it "a triumph of mood and implication",[7] and James Berardinelli of ReelViews called it a "gem" lost in the "hype" of Hollywood blockbusters.[8] Ty Burr of The Boston Globe deemed it "a conceit on a number of levels" and "confused between an 'artistic' lesbian movie and Heavenly Creatures", while commending Blunt's performance and the cinematography and declaring that "at its most interesting, [it] offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through."[9] Steve Schneider of Orlando Weekly called it "slight and predictable at its core" but praised the performances and the "black humor" between the female characters "that endows the movie with most of its genuinely entertaining moments."[10]

Autostraddle listed the film as #19 in a ranking of the 102 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time.[11]

Awards and nominations

My Summer of Love was nominated for the British Independent Film Award at the 2004 British Independent Film Awards, the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 2005 BAFTAs, the Best New British Feature award at the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival, the European Film Award at the 2005 European Film Awards, the ALFS award at the 2005 London Critics Circle Film Awards, and the 2005 Directors Guild Of Great Britain Awards.[12] Out of these it won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the BAFTAs, the Directors Guild Of Great Britain Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in British Film, the Best New British Feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and the ALFS award at the London Critics Circle Film Awards.[12]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "My Summer of Love (2005)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 5 July 2009.
  2. ^ a b "大阪でバーベキューをするならレンタルが一番。近くの川で思う存分楽しめます。｜Bbqおおさか".
  3. ^ "My Summer of Love (2004)-Release dates". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 5 July 2009.
  4. ^ "My Summer Of Love (2004)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved 20 March 2020.
  5. ^ "My Summer Of Love Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 20 March 2020.
  6. ^ Ebert, Roger (17 June 2005). "My Summer of Love". Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert Digital LLC. Retrieved 5 July 2020.
  7. ^ Scott, A.O. (17 June 2005). "United by a Sisterly Bond, Friends Explore Teenage Love". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 July 2009.
  8. ^ Berardinelli, James. "My Summer Of Love". ReelViews. Retrieved 5 July 2009.
  9. ^ Burr, Ty (17 June 2005). "Intense 'Summer' wilts under hazy direction, Friends Explore Teenage Love". Boston Globe. Retrieved 5 July 2009. [dead link‍]
  10. ^ Schneider, Steve (14 July 2005). "Before A Fall". Orlando Weekly. Retrieved 5 July 2009. [dead link‍]
  11. ^ "Now, An Updated Edition Of The 102 Best Lesbian Movies Of All Time". Autostraddle. 14 February 2017. Retrieved 8 July 2017.
  12. ^ a b "My Summer of Love (2004)- Awards". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 5 July 2009.
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