My Summer Of Love

Great Movie!!!!! Great and Eclectic Music!!!!This eclectic soundtrack features an original score by Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory (from Goldfrapp) and the famous song “Lovely Head” by Goldfrapp. Also featured are the unforgettable songs, “Sway” by Julie London, “La Foule” by Edith Piaf and “Tres Caravelas” by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso as well classical pieces by Mozart, Borodin and more.

The relationship between two British teenage girls, both very different in their social status as well as their outlook on the world and their own life in general, is the story of this English film.

Mona (Nathalie Press) lives in a small Yorkshire town, grungy in it's antique structure, and it's no surprise that she lives in perpetual boredom. Her parents are dead, only being looked after by her brother (Paddy Considine), a former hoodlum who turned born-again Christian during his prison stay, spending his free time holding spiritual meetings at his house/former pub for other born-agains and holding grandiose rallies in the Yorkshire hills. He's trying to impose his newfound Christian "love" upon Mona, but she essentially sees this as the loss of her brother, whom she views as ridiculous.

In one of her first scenes in the film, she is seen lying face down in a roadside shoulder, looking comatose and lifeless, and mentally that seems more than an apt depiction of how the summer will likely turn out.

Then, just like a classic fairy tale before it, her summer is salvaged as an affluent, beautiful stranger named Tamsin (Emily Blunt) comes galloping by on a majestic white horse, and Mona's once painfully hopeless existence is irrevocably changed.

And that what ignites a summer long affair, one that moves from a mutual fascination to a sisterly companionship to a fiercely erotic intimacy. Now perhaps this might sound like the path many ambitious stories about youthful romance have taken before it, but the film doesn't so much use this romantic trajectory as a plot accellerator but rather tightly focusing on the characters who inhibit it, gazing over them as they both fall intensely in love, trying to figure out both each other and themselves.


And these two particular heroines are definitely a study of contrast. Tamsin is a dreamer; one who is both hyper-intellectualizing and very, very melodramatic (she is a consistent name-dropper of classic writers and musicians from Nietschze to Ediath Piath; she also laments over her dead sister with tear-and-soul-draining operatic outbursts). Since her family has wealth and generally ignores her, the excessive comfort and general unfulfilment that this upper-crust life evokes allows Tamsin to project an exotic life of fanciful make-believe that's not really hers. Mona, on the other hand, is much wryer and de-romanticized, a realist by both situation and natural intuition. Although she certainly has a very impish nature and a gleefully sardonic wit, she still views the world around her with a playful but unvarnished directness, but that certainly doesn't keep her from yearning for something more.