Watch My Summer of Love For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Yup, this is like Heavenly Creatures in many ways. No, it doesn't end in the same way, so it's not like a sister or anything, but a drama that becomes a romance and also gets really dark. The performances are fantastic, and like in Heavenly Creatures, it's the more supporting female lead that is the stand-out. I could see why Emily Blunt broke out in such a huge way for this. She's absolutely amazing, mesmerizing and effective to the point thats he can be charming one minute and completely terrifying the next. The character is an unpredictable one, one that has many shades, and Blunt is absolutely up to the task, and certainly had the talent to pull it off. The film is very good, but yeah, the film belongs to her.

Filmed at the termination point of the Calder Valley, Yorkshire, where it runs into Lancashire (with a few scenes shot in Bacup over on the Red Rose side of the border), My Summer Of Love is a nicely shot, relatively brief and mostly engrossing character study loosely adapted from a novel by Helen Cross. It examines the growth of a lesbian love affair between two extremely different – seemingly incompatible – teen aged girls, separated by a gulf in class, interests, education and upbringing. Throughout the film, there remains a continual question mark over the actuality of their relationship – is it real? Is it mutual? Or is at least one of the girls cruelly playing with the other's emotions?One hot summer in Yorkshire, aimless teenager Mona (Natalie Press) meets a girl of similar age from an upper middle class background, the enigmatic and troublesome Tamsin (Emily Blunt). Mona lives with her only living relative – her brother Phil (Paddy Considine) – in a pub called The Swan, which was run by their mother before she died of cancer. Phil is a former jailbird, now a born-again Christian, who no longer operates The Swan as a pub but instead uses it as a gathering place for religious meetings with his like-minded friends Frustrated by her brother's activities, and ditched by her mean-spirited f@ck-buddy Ricky (Dean Andrews), Mona finds herself gravitating more and more towards her new friend Tamsin. It becomes clear that Tamsin's family set-up is a mess – her mother is hardly ever at home, her father is dismissive and is suspected of having an affair with his secretary, and her sister died of anorexia. Rapidly, Tamsin and Mona discover an ally in each other – someone with whom to share their inner turmoil, their disconnectedness from their families, their need to be loved. And it isn't long before they do indeed fall in love. Meanwhile, Phil plans to construct a huge cross and erect it on a hilltop above the valley, to drive out the 'evil' he senses in the people living there. Mona has no interest in attending the rally at which the cross is to be unveiled, but Tamsin insists on being there. It gradually becomes clear Tamsin wants something from Phil – but what? Is she attracted to him, or does she merely plan to lure him in before humiliating him over his religious beliefs? Moreover, if she is capable of playing such cruel games, what is to say she isn't also playing games with Mona's heart? As the summer heat-wave builds, so too the emotions of the characters boil over into lust and violence.A small, quiet film which stays on the side of subtlety rather than opting for melodramatic excesses, My Summer Of Love is well-acted and believable throughout. Press plays Mona well, conveying the frustration, confusion and (to some extent) trashiness of the character convincingly. Pre-stardom Blunt is also excellent as Tamsin, fleshing out the character with many nuances which make it hard to decide whether she is a genuinely disaffected young lady or a manipulative bitch who gets her kicks from breaking hearts and causing havoc. The ever-reliable Considine rounds off the main characters brilliantly, playing a man ostensibly calm and peaceable on the outside but with an ever-present hint of ominous rage within. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski directs the film with a typically European sensibility. It's unusual to find a foreign director tackling one of these Yorkshire-set stories, but it must be said he brings something new and fascinating to the proceedings. The harsher, uglier side of Yorkshire is usually presented in these films, but here Pawlikowski contrasts these things with the glorious wide open spaces of the countryside. The darkness and bleakness exist more within the characters than the setting, and the contrasts that result are very stark and effective. Sometimes the film teeters on the brink of being a little too self-consciously arty, and the relatively short running time might leave some viewers wanting more (more explanation, more characterisation, more tying together of the loose ends), but all in all My Summer Of Love is a very worthwhile little film. For its strong performances and eye-catching cinematography alone, it deserves to be seen.

As vividly, as well as fatally, as opposites attract in real life, so My Summer Of Love presents us with a choice of wildly colourful opposites to be drawn to: Tamsen, a bored, privileged, pathological liar out for kicks, ultimately at the devastating expense of her new lover Mona, herself newly spurned by a local much-too-old schlub. One can identify with Mona's plight, that of an orphaned teen on a motor-less bike in a bleak working class hub of town, with absolutely no prospects. Or one can identify with Tamsen, left alone in her family's enormous home for an entire summer, only capable of experiencing passion from behind a facade of elaborate lies. You just know after Tamsen's shattering deception of Mona that neither will ever be the same again. You are left to wonder how embittered Mona will now grow, having now been so cruelly lead on by by members of both sexes, the latter whom she grows to love deeply. You are equally left to wonder how Mona's reaction to Tamsen's summer-long deceits might penetrate the latter.Ultimately one might be equally drawn to facets of both characters, as they collectively represent the harder coming-into-awareness lessons we all learn: sooner or later we're all spurned, sooner or later we all protect our vulnerability behind lies, sooner or later love fades no matter how elaborate or widespread the pursuit. The hardest lesson, as starkly depicted in My Summer Of Love's final moments, is how love is perhaps more an experience unique to the individual than something shared. Tamsen seems to have instinctively known this all along, cynically protecting herself through her building and inhabiting a fantasy world; Mona turns out to be her plaything, a plaything who believes her beloved Tamsen, literally on a white horse, is nothing less than her savior and ticket out of bleak working-class nowheres-ville. Tamsen is master of the set-up, Mona truly loves. Her allegiance to Tamsen is a currency equal parts genuine, desperate, hopeless. When the smoke clears and Tamsen is left to return to school and Mona to her dead-end town, who has had the greater love, rich shielded Tamsen, or poor vulnerable Mona?

Shades of Heavenly Creatures in this unsettling drama from Poland's Pawel Pawlikowski. Working-class Mona, on a broken-down scooter, encounters upper-class Tamsin staring down at her from a horse. The mad, staring eye of the horse should fill Mona with foreboding; instead, she embarks on a summer of love with Tamsin that shimmers with magnetic attraction. Danger, however, feels never far away.Natalie Press as Mona reprises her outing in Wasp, a thrill-seeking member of the underclass, moving inexorably among fags, beer and back-seat sex in lay-byes. Given the chance to blossom, we see there is self-awareness and irony there, too. She also does a very creepy impersonation of someone possessed by the devil. She will discover, however, that possession by evil spirits is no laughing matter.Emily Blunt as Tasmin oozes decadence. Her tears and gnashing at a supposed infidelity by her father does not quite add up. Her fraud expands with some outrageous tales about Edith Piaf, and we feel she is testing the boundaries of Mona's gullibility. But Mona remains hooked. A shape-shifting seductress, there is a self-destructive element to Tasmin's machinations. She comes very close when exposing the religious fraud of Mona's brother Phil (a haunted Paddy Considine), who plummets from the high of raising his cross above their valley, to the low of succumbing to the temptations of the flesh.Set in an unknown valley in an undefined era, the film has an allegorical, other-worldliness to it. No TV, no radio, no mobile phones, no computers. Mona even rides an engine-less bike. Is this purgatory? The true state of the world is revealed to Mona only once she has decided to flee it, and that decision is cast in a new light.Production values never get above made-for-TV level, but My Summer of Love is both poetic and depraved, with characters you may just fall for.