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Summer Day Dreaming

By Melissa Starker
Columbus Alive | June 23, 2005
Paul Pavlikovsky offers a thoughtful, impressionistic take on a salacious topic: one heated summer between two teenage girls in Yorkshire. It’s so slight in its plot and so ethereal in its treatment that it feels more like a daydream than a movie, and it offers that same pleasant buzz of letting your mind travel a distance that your body can’t follow.

Mona (Nathalie Press) is a local girl, living above the pub her mother ran before her death, with her older brother Phil (Paddy Considine), who’s turned away from his former life as a violent convict, embraced God and converted the pub into a house of prayer.

Into this scenario rides summer visitor Tamsin (Emily Blunt) like a knight on a white horse, offering Mona escape and a chance at worldliness. Lots of drunken sleepovers lead to the inevitable, innocent lip lock, but their sense of abandonment soon goes public, and Phil points to his sister as the embodiment of the evil that exists in their town.

There’s not much more to the story, but the draw is how closely and warmly newcomers Press and Blunt welcome us into the girls’ world, its physical intimacies and the more lasting bonds of trust that appear to form. They’re both spellbinding, and Pavlikovsky allows the time and space to let them work their magic.
Tags: My Summer of Love, Emily Blunt, Nathalie Press, Paul Pavlikovsky, salacious

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