My Summer of Love
''My Summer of Love" works extremely hard to appear messy and artless; it wants to be a ripe-to-bursting fruit that falls off the tree at your feet. The approach yields dividends: a film about adolescent passion, ''Summer" has been shot with a feverish, hazy intensity that mirrors its heroines' emotional state. This is what life looks like from too close up.
Despite that achievement, Pawel Pawlikowski's film remains a conceit on a number of levels. Here's a story about two girls who fall in love: It could be about sexual pleasure or power games or social class or religious mania. It could be entirely hedonistic or carry a hidden moral sting. It could even work as a subtle parody of overwrought girls on the cusp of womanhood. Working from Helen Cross's 2001 novel, Pawlikowski and his actors give us a little of everything and therefore something perilously close to nothing.
Still, ''Summer" has received rapturous reviews in some quarters, mostly from men, and a cynic might be tempted to file even the most intellectual raves next to a recent Internet post that read, ''Dude, it has lesbians, and not half-bad looking ones. What's not to like?" There's something to be said for honesty.
Pawlikowski sets his tale in Yorkshire, in aimless midsummer; the heat waves rising off the fields are almost as thick as the accents. Mona (Nathalie Press) is a rawboned, freckle-faced local with a grudge against the world; she could pass for actress Tilda Swinton's loose country cousin. Lying amid the clover one afternoon, she looks up to see an imperious young woman named Tamsin (Emily Blunt) on horseback. Cut to a close-up of the horse's trembling eye. Introductions are made; ''Funny," says Tamsin, ''you don't look like a Mona." Cue muffled snickers from some quarters of the audience and outraged shushing from others.
There are further hints that we're not to take ''My Summer of Love" as soberly as one might think. Tamsin, a private school girl who lives in the village's mansion on the hill, takes it upon herself to inculcate the working-class Mona in the ways of Nietzsche and Edith Piaf, and her dormitory pompousness can be a hoot. Blunt gives a fine performance that shows us the self-dramatizing dowager looming in Tamsin's future; for now, the character is sexy, pathetic, and obnoxious all at once.
Mona becomes putty in Tamsin's hands; the loss of willpower is what turns her on. Her mother's dead, her father's long gone, and her brother Phil (Paddy Considine) is an ex-con reprobate who has found Jesus and is building a giant cross to erect on a nearby mount. Why, I'm not sure, since he already has a cross to bear in Mona, who mourns the loss of her sibling and does all she can to make his strange and humorless replacement miserable.
But Mona and Tamsin have it in for the world, which is indisputably male, and they create a simmering, rebellious alternate universe of their own. The slow amble up to their mutual seduction has moments of real erotic power -- and just as many moments of dippy, sub-D.H. Lawrence symbolism that wouldn't feel out of place on Cinemax after midnight. The languorous waterfall where they swim and first kiss; the apple Tamsin chews as she contemplates tempting Phil -- is Pawlikowski kidding with this stuff? And if he is, to what purpose?
For my money, the film's star is cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski, who also shot the director's 2000 breakthrough ''Last Resort." There he imbued a depressed resort town in the north of England with unexpected magic; here, it's as though he has reinvented how to see the world. He injects an impatient, hormonal heat into the camera angles and woozy colors -- the cinematographic equivalent of an adolescent's diary.
Some of the narrative twists may shock you, or you may see them coming a mile down the lane; in any event, ''My Summer of Love" remains stubbornly stalled between ''artistic" lesbian hubba-hubba and such tougher fare as Peter Jackson's superior ''Heavenly Creatures," which went much further into the gray area of adolescent passions and power games. At its most interesting, the movie offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through. Phil believes in Jesus (he says); Mona believes in Tamsin (she says); Tamsin believes in nothing (she says).
What does Pawel Pawlikowski believe in? And why is he so reluctant to tell us?
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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