"Take that pudding away, it has no theme" Winston Churchill once said to a waiter. A lack of theme is something I usually steel myself for whenever I see the phrases "rite of passage" or "coming of age" in the gloss for a book or a film.
If it aspires to be re-watchable this sort of film really ought to have more than just eye-catchingly beautiful visualisations and accomplished performances (which MSOL most definitely has), it also needs memorable dialogue that opens up the characters' inner worlds to us and contributes to the key themes being explored by the plot.
Jean Cocteau observed that "a true poet doesn't bother to be poetical" and Pawel Pawilowski's improvised scripting takes such not-botherment to new levels, thereby contriving a possibly unintentional, yet buffeting contrast with the camerawork, which at times is painstakingly poetic (to the point of being una paja cinematica). Another opposition which ends up being more irritating than illuminating is that between the abstracted rural English setting and the realist representation of the girls' erotic friendship.
My Summer of Love, which collected the BAFTA for Best British Film last year, appears to have been conceived as an intelligent, foreign art-house film set on English soil. However, it's not an England you will readily recognise as the village where we see the girls growing close (a combination of Todmorden in West Yorks and nearby Bacup in Lancs) appears to be inhabited almost exclusively by a sect of mumbling religious nutjobs. It makes for a strangely exotic location which adds to the sense of unreality that dogs the story.
I haven't read Helen Cross's original novel, but I understand that it ends more bloodily. As such it is probably clearer to the reader what has irrevocably changed when the last page has been turned. Pawilowski pulls up short of that sort of violent climax, perhaps leaving it understood that what comes next is the off-the-shelf adult life both girls had been seeking to delay, at least while summer lasted. This much at least is a universal theme, an allegory about all our sunny days of late adolescence.
Both lead actresses are posh southerners, which surely makes Nathalie Press's rendition of Mona the most striking performance in the film. (She originally tested for the part of Tamsin.) Emily Blunt's interview on the DVD demonstrated however that she had a firm grasp of her character's inner struggles and motivations; it's just a pity that the words she was given to speak didn't help her to communicate them better.
Might it have been just a little bit easier to expand the underlying themes if one of the pair, Mona in particular, had been male? A boy-girl love affair would have denied the story its trangressive appeal (perhaps a requirement for art-house success), but having talked through the possibilities, V and I were both convinced it would have forced the plot to demonstrate its point more convincingly. After all, what does the lesbian taboo angle really add to a narrative whose main ingredient is class?
