Young Mona, who lives above the Swan with her ex-con, now Christian older brother Phil, has never known the luxury of fantasy. That is, until she meets haughty Tamsin, who canters into her life on a white horse one lazy summer afternoon, for all the world like an apparition Mona has summoned from the depths of her boredom.
There is nothing quite like the hothouse fever of falling in love with a new friend. Better still when said friend is high-handed and impossibly pretentious, as only the young and well-to-do can be. Imperious Tamsin takes Mona into her family's frequently empty summer estate, recommends she read Nietzsche and Freud, dresses her in her dead sister Sadie's clothes, and swills heroic quanitities of red wine, all to the strains of Edith Piaf.
The sob-caught-in-the-throat quality of the Little Sparrow should have been Mona's first clue that Tamsin is a bit melodramatic, but being on the receiving end of such intense attention is itself so intoxicating and novel that she falls in love with everything about Tamsin.
Both actresses are beautiful, with pellucid, poreless, dewy skin, and their summer idylls are gorgeously shot to a languid score by Goldfrapp. The film shares DNA with other intense female friendship movies--particularly Les Biches, Heavenly Creatures, and The Dreamlife of Angels, but also, to a lesser extent, 3 Women, Morvern Callar [imagine Mona as a brighter Lana], and Picnic at Hanging Rock--but ultimately My Summer of Love lacks sand. Like its lead fantasist, Tamsin, the film doesn't concern itself with consequences as much as affect. There's no sense of the lasting repercussions of this amour feu, no "after that summer I was forever changed" closure. It's simply an updated Radley Metzger provocation masquerading as sophistication.
The film's tagline poses this slightly naughty, oh yes we do have beautiful girls kissing, thanks for noticing, premise: "The most dangerous thing to want is more." I'll say. Unfortunately, there's no there there. My Summer of Love glistens like morning dew on grass and, just as insubstantial, quickly dissipates into vapor.
