MY SUMMER OF LOVE

MY SUMMER OF LOVE is a complex, thoughtfully made British movie that, deep down, argues that the Christian notions of morality and family have disintegrated.

Mona is a lonely high school-aged girl in rural England. She lives with her brother, who has just emerged from jail as a born-again Christian. Their parents are dead. While riding her bike, Mona meets Tamsin, a rich girl who has been suspended from her boarding school. Tamsin is aggressive, beautiful and daring – and thus unlike Mona. They form an awkward friendship that grows rapidly as the two simply have no one else with whom to talk or spend time.

After weeks of exploring the countryside, the girls believe they are falling in love. They begin sleeping together, and Tamsin pledges that they will “never be parted.” Mona’s brother Phil finds out about their affair and, heavily under the sway of his newfound Christian fundamentalism, stops Mona from seeing her girlfriend by locking her in a bedroom. Phil loses his faith after a humiliation at Tamsin’s and Mona’s hands, and Mona tries to run away with Tamsin, only to learn a cold, difficult secret and wind up alone again.

For most of the movie, the newly converted Phil seems sincere, if dramatic, about his faith. He and his friends construct a replica of the Cross and stand it up on a tall hill over their village, a grand gesture which invites accusations of hypocrisy. While Phil tells a girl about the Gospel, he almost kisses her, and the movie suggests that his faith is therefore fake. (A Christian reading might see Phil’s faith as incomplete, or merely subject to human frailty.) Later, Phil admits that his faith is a forgery after his sister pretends to commit suicide.

Mona and Tamsin think Christianity is foolish and fraudulent, and the movie vindicates their opinion. Phil tries to find community with religion, but it fails. Likewise, Mona has no parents and feels totally alienated from her brother, so she builds her ersatz community with the immediate gratification that she finds in sex and lesbianism. Tamsin forms another parallel line, as her parents ignore her and she is separated from her friends, but her antidote for loneliness comes from the power she wields over Mona. Each of these three characters is looking for a family, perhaps even a father or the Father, but they all look in vain places to find it.

MY SUMMER OF LOVE is dull and obvious until the ending, which injects an impressive amount of mystery and reality into the story. The twist exposes all of the characters as pitiful and searching, but the movie doesn’t recognize the seriousness of their problems. They are lost and moving aimlessly, without family, without the guidance of traditional morality.

Clearly, then, this is pretty sobering stuff, and even though it sheds some light on the depths of loneliness some people experience, the filmmakers’ bitterness toward Christianity, as well as their disregard for traditional mores, overwhelm the sensitivity of their observations.