My Summer of Love

If there is such a thing as English cinema, as opposed to British cinema, then this new film from Pawel Pawlikowski fits the bill. It has taken a Polish-born director to respond to the exoticism of the English countryside and English mannerisms of region and class. Within the Yorkshire Dales' sunlit expanses, he has created a swooning love story with wit, flair, eroticism and some New Wave attitude. His two young leads, Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt create a delectable, upwardly-mobile soufflé of a film. Even as its mood turns dark, this tone is managed with superb insouciance, helped by a saturnine performance from Paddy Considine. When the summer ends, as all summers must, sexual obsession, claustrophobia and despair are elegantly resolved with a clever twist in the narrative tail. It's a movie that has conquered festivals at Edinburgh and Toronto, and for me is even better on a second viewing, a gem of intelligent, absorbing film-making.

My Summer of Love is freely adapted from a novel by Helen Cross, and is a tale of romantic and erotic subversion with Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in its DNA. There are also antecedents in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar and Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen. Girl meets girl one lazy, hazy summer and the unique intensity of female friendship - so much more vivid than anything experienced by or with those hopeless boys - has a fissile power, an irresistible ignition of strength.

Press plays Mona, bored to tears with life in provincial Yorkshire, and especially bored with her brother Phil (Paddy Considine) who is a reformed violent criminal and born-again Christian now righteously pouring away the stocks of booze in the pub owned by their late parents, and re-purposing this place of sin as a prayer centre. Then she meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt), a kindred spirit despite being outrageously posh, who's rusticated from her private girls' school, and whose neglectful parents let her have the run of their magnificent Tudor family home. Mona explains that her name is actually Lisa, but her habit of complaining got her the nickname "Moaner" Lisa, from her brother, back in the days when he had a sense of humour. Tamsin's enigmatic response is simply to drawl: "I've studied the original."

Mona is captivated by her new friend's callow sophistication and dreamy sensuality and also by Tamsin's brittle accomplishments, which include equestrianism and what sounds like grade eight distinction on the cello. She performs Saint-Saëns's The Swan from Carnival of the Animals; Mona responds brightly by saying that her ex-pub was called the Swan - a good omen! Airily, Tamsin shows Mona around the wonderful house, with its extensive ivy patiently engaged in undermining the centuries-old brickwork, currently vacated by her eccentric family - and pretty well plays Sebastian Flyte to Mona's saucer-eyed Charles Ryder. Together, they stretch out as dusk falls on an overgrown grass tennis court of the sort I thought had ceased to exist in fact or fiction, and Tamsin holds forth about Nietzsche. They have the unimaginable luxury of doing nothing as a golden summer unfurls: doing nothing, that is, but consuming her wine, listening to Edith Piaf and Borodin, and getting as drunk as (extremely horny) skunks. And that is a condition that takes its natural course when Tamsin asks Mona to demonstrate exactly how her married ex-boyfriend used to screw her.

Their respective siblings complicate things. Tamsin's reserve crumbles when she starts talking about her sister Sadie, who she says died some years previously of anorexia. Mona's brother Phil is promoting a new scheme to erect a huge cross on a hillside to reclaim the valley from evil. The two women attend the "blessing" ceremony for this cross, at which Phil gives an intense address, and Considine shows how Phil's anger and violence has only been partially absorbed by his new religious enthusiasms. Mona and Tamsin had thought only to be derisively amused, but Mona is uneasy to see that Tamsin is rather taken by Phil's rugged presence, and has clearly evinced a kittenish scheme to toy with his troubled emotions.

Intimacy is a difficult thing to show on screen, and so is leisure. But Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt hang out with freshness and spontaneity, helped by Pawlikowski's improvisatory shooting methods and smart dialogue from screenwriter Michael Wynne. Tamsin asks Mona what she has in mind for the future, and she wisecracks: "Get married, to a right bastard, churn out loads of kids with mental problems and then wait for menopause ... or cancer." Her reply playfully but acidly pre-empts Tamsin's habitual edge of cruelty, by sketching out a vision with far more underclass futility than Tamsin could have imagined, thus demonstrating superior insight into both herself and her new friend.

Emily Blunt might well have it in her to be the new Keira Knightley - although she reminded me more of Eva Green in Bertolucci's The Dreamers. And Nathalie Press could be the new Samantha Morton, only with the added element of a sense of humour. They've got chemistry all right, and they make their film look like a remix of The Go-Between, only with Mona and Tamsin somehow playing both the lovers and the innocent messenger. It's a dangerous adventure, and a very English one, too.