My Summer of Love (2004) is based on a Helen Cross novel with the same title. The story is seen through the eyes of a working class young woman named Mona (Natalie Press). Mona’s hotheaded brother Phil (Paddy Considine) has become a born-again Christian while in prison. Phil converts the pub he and Mona operated into a regions meeting house with no alcohol allowed. Mona meets upper middle class Tamsin (Emily Blunt, in her theatrical film debut) who has just been suspended from College. Tamsin also who suffers from a lack of love from her family. Her mother is busy with her charity projects and her father is busy having an affair with his secretary.
Both women are estranged from the people closest to them. Mona hates the religious fanatic her brother has become. Tamsin resents being left alone and ignored in an enormous house. Mona and Tamsin begin as friends but as the summer progresses, they become more intimate. Filmed in West Yorkshire, My Summer of Love looks great. What’s not so great is the lack of true love in this film. I came away disappointed. GRADE: C
It is a pretty annoying fizzle of a film. That Mona is portrayed as, essentially, once a yobbo, always a yobbo, was particularly offputting. Alice fell in lust with Blunt in this film, and that hasn’t subsided over the years (I joke that Blunt and Rachel Weisz have both moved to NYC to be closer to Alice and me), but neither of us wee impressed with the film when we saw it when it was new and in the art houses.
Todd, same here. David Thomson raved about My Summer of Love in Sleeping With Strangers so I thought I’d give it a look. Big mistake!