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Pride Watch: My Summer of Love
Jun. 3rd, 2018 08:23 pmStarring Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, My Summer of Love (2004) is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: a summer fling love story that just happens to be between two girls. This is one of those rare, but extremely appreciated, cases where the fact that the romance is queer is completely incidental. It’s also interesting that, given the quirkiness and eccentricity on both sides of the romance, in a hetero love story either of them could be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who shakes up the boy’s boring life and shows him how to enjoy himself. They are both messy, flawed, compelling characters who happen to find each other and fall in love.
That said, the plot summary is so vague and deceptive I wonder if they’re trying to hide the romance on purpose, and why. The blurb on the DVD cover ends like this: “[W]hat started as a magical friendship soon becomes laced with deception and danger.” This is the Focus Features “Spotlight Edition” DVD I’m looking at, if that makes a difference.
Two points. 1) They call the relationship a “friendship.” See, there’s this thing in media where if two women are depicted in a romantic setting with each other, the narrative has to pretty much hit the audience over the head with it in order for them to acknowledge it as anything other than a friendship. See also: Heavenly Creatures, which was blurbed in a similar way; and the Harold They’re Lesbians meme. This movie has multiple kissing scenes, sex scenes, and breathless declarations of love. It could not be more blatant.
2) That “deception and danger” thing made me think again of Heavenly Creatures, in which the two girls become so desperate in their desire to stay together that they straight up murder someone. Yeah, that doesn’t happen here. Tamsin and Mona are both rebellious, impulsive, and have a bit of a mean sense of humor, prone to sometimes destructive pranks, but their actions mostly fall under the umbrella of Rebellious Shenanigans. They don’t get into any serious trouble, basically ever. Which is fine with me, but I wonder if there was some underlying sense of menace that I completely missed. Or maybe this blurb-writer thinks getting high and then crashing Mona’s Bible-thumping brother’s praise band meeting is a more serious offense than I do. Who knows?
Those weird false advertising speed bumps aside, this is a compelling, hazy, and dreamlike depiction of a brief but spellbinding intersection of two lives. Their romance is dazzling and beautiful, but as with all summer romances, doomed to drift away like dandelion seeds.
That said, the plot summary is so vague and deceptive I wonder if they’re trying to hide the romance on purpose, and why. The blurb on the DVD cover ends like this: “[W]hat started as a magical friendship soon becomes laced with deception and danger.” This is the Focus Features “Spotlight Edition” DVD I’m looking at, if that makes a difference.
Two points. 1) They call the relationship a “friendship.” See, there’s this thing in media where if two women are depicted in a romantic setting with each other, the narrative has to pretty much hit the audience over the head with it in order for them to acknowledge it as anything other than a friendship. See also: Heavenly Creatures, which was blurbed in a similar way; and the Harold They’re Lesbians meme. This movie has multiple kissing scenes, sex scenes, and breathless declarations of love. It could not be more blatant.
2) That “deception and danger” thing made me think again of Heavenly Creatures, in which the two girls become so desperate in their desire to stay together that they straight up murder someone. Yeah, that doesn’t happen here. Tamsin and Mona are both rebellious, impulsive, and have a bit of a mean sense of humor, prone to sometimes destructive pranks, but their actions mostly fall under the umbrella of Rebellious Shenanigans. They don’t get into any serious trouble, basically ever. Which is fine with me, but I wonder if there was some underlying sense of menace that I completely missed. Or maybe this blurb-writer thinks getting high and then crashing Mona’s Bible-thumping brother’s praise band meeting is a more serious offense than I do. Who knows?
Those weird false advertising speed bumps aside, this is a compelling, hazy, and dreamlike depiction of a brief but spellbinding intersection of two lives. Their romance is dazzling and beautiful, but as with all summer romances, doomed to drift away like dandelion seeds.