My Summer of Love
R, 86 min.
Now playing at Green Hills 16
Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love is the kind of movie that cares less about who a man is than about how it sounds when he pulls up a blade of grass—but that doesn't mean it's some plotless exercise in "pure cinema." It's actually highly accessible, with a relatable premise. Still, the narrative's not the attraction in My Summer of Love. Instead, Pawlikowski wants to immerse us in his characters' languid milieu.
Nathalie Press plays Mona, a Yorkshire party girl in her late teens saddled with a pious older brother, Phil (played by Paddy Considine), and the pub that their parents left them when they died. Mona wants to keep the pub running. Phil wants to turn it into a church. And as for Tasmin, the local rich girl played by Emily Blunt, she just wants to toy with Phil's and Mona's affections. The whole scenario plays like a biblical parable. An Edenic small town has its peace threatened by the snakeskin-clad, apple-eating Tasmin, who tempts both brother and sister to do bad. It's a primal kind of story, and even though neither the setup nor the payoff is all that novel, the three actors move through the script's paces as though they were seeing and feeling it for the first time.
Pawlikowski uses simple story hooks to pull the audience into a world of cinematic texture. Like Wong Kar-Wai and Lynne Ramsay, he's primarily concerned with setting a hazy, dreamy mood. Some directors shoot at the evening hour, when the sun's disappearing behind the horizon, but Pawlikowski likes the late afternoon, when the sun's piercing through the shade of a leafy tree or filtering through window curtains. His whole movie has the quality of an unplanned nap on a grassy hill. While the audience drifts off, every sensory input gets heightened. A bite into a croissant sounds like music; the deep, rubbery snap of a blade of grass being pulled from the ground sounds like a skipping heartbeat.
It's when the nap ends—with a dull ache in the head and a pervasive sense of disorientation—that the trouble starts. Throughout My Summer of Love, the three principles pretend in various ways to be people they're not: sophisticated, romantic, tragic, passive, etc. Phil has it the worst, as he tries to put his days as a pub-rat thug and ex-con behind him, so that he can devote himself to the Lord. But he finds Mona too trying and Tasmin too alluring. When he and everybody else in My Summer of Love have to stop playing dress-up, the tranquillity of a long, lazy afternoon gets shattered, with a slap as loud as a shot.
Then and only then does the plot—My Summer of Love's weakest aspect—take over. But even then, Pawlikowski cares more about capturing the bare-lit rooms and shady creek banks where the fantasy ends, not so much what goes on there.
