Watching My Summer of Love, a mood-swinging idyll set in West Yorkshire, England, you may laugh out loud when Tamsin, the dark upper-crust beauty who enthralls working-class gal Mona, tells her she would like Nietzsche, and then quickly adds Freud. The writer-director, Pawel Pawlikowski, displays a good ear for the intellectual name-dropping common in early adulthood; he also boasts a precise sense of rank-pulling in relationships. You hope that he won't leave satire far behind - but he does.
The tale of how Tamsin (Emily Blunt) and Mona (Natalie Press) begin a lesbian relationship that means vastly different things to each of them is like a finely wrought cameo mounted on an enormous museum wall. It doesn't have enough weight, whether in conflict or revelation, to sustain the time and space Pawlikowski allots to it.
You see all too clearly what Mona gets out of their bond: Lovemaking a lot more tender than what she's used to from men, entree to a world of culture and sophistication, escape from the influence of her born-again, ex-con brother Phil (Paddy Considine). And you see early on what Tamsin derives from it, too. Mona is more of a doer than a thinker. Tamsin's dad has kept busy philandering with his executive assistant; when Tamsin takes her new friend to the secretary's house, and they see his car parked outside, Mona smashes the driver's seat window.
