"My Summer of Love" tells the story of a young girl with a newly-christian brother, who meets a strange rich girl one day and begins to fall in love with her. As they step over their former boundaries together, a bond begins to form that gets tested when some lies begin to come clearer.This is a typical coming-of-age drama, centered around some very different girls with not so different problems. At some points it tried a bit too hard to add drama and meaning but overall it has its moments. In the end it maybe is not so much a story of love than it is a story of power and abuse. Personally, I would have wished for some more powerful ups and downs, but nonetheless you can read a lot into it.All in all there are better films in this genre but there are also definitely worse. If you like more thoughtful films that don't necessarily involve a lot of action, this one could be just right for you.

You get what you expect with this film. You get love, and you get summer fun. The story is about two girls trying to escape their troubled family life and explore things together. Emily Blunt is always good, and I was pleased with Natalie Press' performance as well. Besides the fact this is a lesbian based relationship, you actually get a true romance to go along with it. I understand for some people, the idea of this love is offsetting but the film depicts it more as summer fun then a dissection of lesbian lovers.I have to say it's pretty predictable, and there isn't as much depth to it as I would have thought. But considering this is basically Emily Blunt's first starring role, I think it's worth the watch. Mona and Tamsin did play well off each other, much props to both the actresses for going beyond what a typical actor would do. I'm sure it takes guts to do this type of role, especially early on in their careers. The film isn't anything special, but it does give you 85 minutes of summer. And to me, it's always good to step away from life for a few hours and enjoy a different lifestyle than your own. I really like the movies that send you to a different part of the world and give you more insight into what life is like other places. I wasn't thrilled with the plot overall and the ending could have been handled better.But because of the great lead performances, and the nice feel of summer the film gives you, I think it is a worthy watch. Especially for film buffs, and big fans of Emily Blunt.+Emily Blunt shines +Summer fun -Not enough depth to the story 7.2/10

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.

My Summer of Love is a wonderfully observed, simmering drama about love, identity and coming-of-age shared between two girls during one warm summer in a sleepy and somewhat unspectacular rural area of England. But where the tall, lonely country houses sit amongst the overkill of trees and tall plantation hidden away, remarkable items happen to two young souls running on scarred prior histories amidst the sunny haze, culminating in a rather terrifying sequence capturing the destructive nature of an extreme fondness for another human being in a location previously established to be a safe haven for admitting said fondness. The film clocks in at under an hour and a half, but achieves so much more and gives you that sense of journey in this short runtime than certain other films clocking in at a round two hours can seemingly do.The girls of the film are Mona (Press) and Tamsin (Blunt), two individuals that meet in a field when the latter, by way of horseback, rides along and finds Mona lying in the grass. Very quickly, the film establishes a sense of empowerment in the character of Tamsin; her position on a horse as we look up from Mona's point of view is distinctive in its use of low angle and positioning of one character quite literally on the floor with the other atop an animal. Mona is bored and lonely, living with recently released but now converted Christian criminal Phil (Considine), her brother, in a disused public house they own; whereas Tamsin is away on suspension from her boarding school for whatever reason. Her place of dwelling being a large and somewhat dystopian place for Mona when she first visits; captured by way of a long shot of the entrance hallway from the inside as she stumbles through the panel floored room full of riches and items.The girls are both of different classes and backgrounds. Lisa is a somewhat rough, pub dwelling loose cannon whose male partner makes crude love to her in the back of his car as during the days, she drifts aimlessly around and mocks her brother's attempts to live a life so much differently to that of his previous one. But these young women are bound by their being stuck in said location and in their inability to connect with parental family figures; plus, a supposed initial sense of unity through past suffering of a death within the family. What follows is a predominant uncovering of sexuality, although certain characters have certain secrets that become more omnipresent in what is a wonderful character piece with the greatest of respects to its subject matter.The film is a mature character study, focusing on the transitions people go through at various stages of their life for whatever reason, with religious transitions and changes linked to one's sexuality taking centre stage. But these transitions are not easy, and what differentiates them from one another is that Phil's is an enforced change, something he consciously takes on with his sister Mona's gradual veering into homosexuality sincerely natural. Polish born director Pawel Pawlikowski shoots the film's location with a warm and misleadingly welcoming glare, complimenting the sorts of emotions I think Mona goes through when she first meets Tamsin and eventually comes to recognise the friendship between them. His long shots of the overall village and its surrounding hills and train lines make it look a bit like a model, as if it isn't really real, which systematically sets up that sense of falseness within some of the characters in the film; that sense of all is not as real as initially established. Later on, whilst in a more suburban part of the town and a housing estate, Tamsin will remark to Mona how fake she thinks everything looks: "like Lego" she exclaims, as the bricked up and much-akin to one another houses stand tall and bland, the sorts of cars in the driveway that Marv from 2005's Sin City would describe as looking like "electric shavers".As their friendship and trust deepens, further visits to Tamsin's large house unfolds for Mona; each one shot as less awe-striking than the first as she gradually settles her way into this relationship with a girl outside of her own class divide. Pawlikowski's script has them dance to an Edith Piaf song together, striking up some rather typical but deliberately so links to French music; the French and that odd sense of romance some people have when thinking of such items. When a kiss ensures at a local secluded spring amidst the sunny glare, Mona tries on a number of different dresses once again back at the house until she can find the right one, a metaphorical sequence capturing her attempts in finding a 'new' her, as her changing persona becomes more apparent.My Summer of Love captures the sense of undergoing transition wonderfully, an identifying of an old way of life or belief then the systematic moving on and away from it. In Phil, that once criminal life that he wishes to bury with a newfound sense of Christianity, as groups of religious people congregate in rooms once lent to drinking one's self into a stupor; is counter-produced with Mona's rejection of her old lifestyle: lazy days doing nothing and evenings of easy, empty sex swapped for a newer and fresher relationship with someone whom will eventually inform her of the kind of love, or loving exchange, that'll instead mean something. Despite disliking brother Phil, and the film making it known she has very few things in common with him, what happens to them both towards the end as they go in search of that epiphany connects them in a way previously unseen as new ways of life and living take their toll. Stark, tragic and smart; My Summer of Love is thoroughly engaging.