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10 Oct 2006

polish-ed director: pawel pawlikowski

Fridae talks to the director of the upcoming lesbian film, My Summer of Love, a mesmerising and dangerous journey into the world of teenage passion. The Oct 16 charity screening will benefit the Association of Women for Action and Research and the Cat Welfare Society.

My Summer of Love is not a comforting film. If you want a family drama about a sane and mature same-sex couple that settles down with a dog and an inseminated baby, you're in the wrong theatre. This is the ultimate dyke drama; 86 minutes of obsession; a dysfunctional, dangerous, unequal love affair between two young women, too passionate to survive into the autumn, too beautiful not to watch.

Top of page: Emily Blunt and Natalie Press (front) play teenaged lovers in My Summer of Love. Top pic: Warsaw-born director Pawel Pawlikowski; Paddy Considine (above) plays Mona's brother who is seen pouring bottles of liquor down the sink and turns the pub he inherited into a into a worship centre for fellow born-again Christians.

Filmed on location in Yorkshire, the movie revolves around the lives of two teenage girls from different backgrounds. Mona (Nathalie Press), is a working-class daughter of a pub-owner who sees no better future for herself than being trapped in an unhappy marriage. Tamsin (Emily Blunt of The Devil Wears Prada) is a posh brunette who lives in a mansion, plays the cello and quotes the great philosophers. Both are terribly bored with their lives - but their chance encounter leads to a deepening friendship, as each reveals secrets and desires, with playful kisses turning to hungry lovemaking as their addiction to one another increases. They walk the wild side, playing pranks for vengeance on their enemies, experimenting with hallucinogens and black magic, avoiding the ministrations of Mona's born-again Christian brother Phil (Paddy Considine). But love can't save these two, because their love is a game played with each other's minds.

Director Pawel Pawlikowski, who hails from Poland, approaches the story in a timeless, dreamlike fashion. He provides odd perspectives from the main characters' points of view, inundating the soundtrack with incidental noise - the buzz of a bicycle wheel, the roar of a blowtorch, the Indian music in a taxicab - all to further immerse the viewer in the absorbing world of the characters, modulated with a disturbingly beautiful musical motif from British electronica group Goldfrapp.

To harness more genuine emotion from actors, Pawlikowski also insisted on shooting scenes in chronological order, distributing a 37-page shooting document rather than a conventional screenplay, giving the stars liberty to interpret sequences with flexible, off-the-cuff dialogue. This yielded some unexpectedly powerful moments - Nathalie's penchant for doodling birthed the opening scene, where Mona frenetically scrawls a life-size marker-pen portrait of her lover on her bedroom wall.

It's all a heady psychological trip, and having seen the film, I'm not surprised it's received so many awards - top prize at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2004 and Best British Film of the Year at the British Academy Film Awards 2005, to name a couple. A broader survey of reviews by RottenTomatoes.com indicates a staggering 91% approval rating from critics in the English-speaking world.

It's all the more remarkable that My Summer of Love is only Pawlikowski's second feature film, produced just a few years after his first, Last Resort, earned him the title of Most Promising Newcomer in British Film from BAFTA 2001.

Fridae found the chance to interrogate this man from Warsaw in preparation for the October 16 screening to benefit the Association of Women for Action and Research and the Cat Welfare Society.

æ: Age, Sex, Location?

Pawlikowski: 49, male, London.

æ: First, the tough stuff. You're a straight man who's made a lesbian movie, about a love so intense that it's destructive. Have you received any flak from the gay and lesbian community for this?

Pawlikowski: Well, my friends who are gay and lesbian didn't attack me. And it won first prize in the Oslo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, 2004. I didn't follow all the reports, so I don't know about other criticism - there's just so much politics, that you have to check in and keep your head down and not worry too much about what people say, or it'll drive you crazy.

But I don't exactly find it a gay film, you know. I totally identify with the character of Mona. It's all about sexual rituals, and the teenage experience of coming of age - I wasn't only dealing with gay emotional issues. It's much more of a story about human nature and the destructiveness of passion.

æ: What about the reaction of the author, Helen Cross? It's her first novel, and it's very much built based on her own life growing up in Yorkshire.

Pawlikowski: She said in public somewhere that she liked it. She came to the premiere and said to a newspaper that she liked the film, but it was a totally different entity from the novel. She'd sold her rights to the film as a writer and then had nothing more to do with it; she just let the screenwriter translate the novel - which was wonderful, because novelists work in such a totally different niche from novelists.

æ: What drew you to the book in the first place?

Pawlikowski: I really liked the voice of the first person narrator, Mona. I liked her mind and I liked her sense of humour, her anarchic yearnings. After I finished the novel, I thought, what a great character, I'd like to see her on screen - but the novel had a lot of things that interested me less. It was a novel of the period, it had a lot about being set in 1984 during the miner's strike, and there was a father and a mother and an obese brother, a pedophile and a serial killer, two murders, the police, just a bigger tapestry of stuff... [Note: in the film version, Mona is orphaned].

I was more interested in her and her game playing, her obsession with Tamsin. They're two complicated characters who are fascinated with each other - they come from two totally different worlds, made of two different materials, with totally different psychologies. That's also very English, the class divide - how people can live in very different societies so geographically close together. So I abandoned most of the minor characters and focused on them alone.

æ: So tell us about the actresses.

Pawlikowski: We spent quite a few months looking at unknown young actresses. I didn't want a known actor. I suppose I was hoping to find a genuine Yorkshire girl, capable of these complex emotions while also being quite earthy and rooted. Then we came across Nathalie, who's as far away from being a Yorkshire lass as I am from being Chinese. She immediately stood out. She had wit and also this inwardness and intensity, an amazing face and great elasticity. We did a few test scenes and she was brilliant; always offbeat, inventive, and surprising. I knew we'd found our heroine.

It also took quite long to find the girl to play Tamsin. Britain seems to produce a lot of girls who can do posh, but I needed someone quite original, complicated, and interestingly devious. We auditioned a lot of young actresses - some rather famous ones, too - but no one stood out. Then Emily Blunt cropped up and there was something striking and lively about her eyes. They were full of mischief, there was always something lurking behind them. She had energy, a quick mind, and a theatricality that really suited Tamsin. She could play posh and confident with ease; she does know that world.

They both won several awards as Best Newcomers, and I think they're doing some very big things now.

æ: Like Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada? It's really weird for a Singapore audience, since we didn't catch your film when it was released in 2004, to see Emily suddenly younger, reverse-aged in this movie.

Pawlikowski: How nice for her. (laughs) Is it any good?

æ: Consensus says it's better than the book.

Pawlikowski: While we were filming in West Yorkshire, actually, the actors lived in a town called Epton Bridge - which happens to be the lesbian capital of Britain.

æ: Regarding your own film - the other main character, Mona's born-again Christian brother, Paddy, wasn't in the original novel. I believe in an interview you said you put him in because you were interested in the phenomenon of born-again Christianity in our culture?

Pawlikowski: Not exactly, no - there was a kind of gap in the story at first; it needed a third strong character with a passion, so I just kind of wove him in, as an ex-convict who believes intensely in God. Not that I'm not interested in born-again Christianity - it comes up as a very emotionally bold movement, very dramatic, very American, with a Manichean vision of the whole world. But it's very shallow and unconvincing, it's not my kind of Christianity. It's just a powerful sensation, lacking any moral code. It's just like love.

æ: (laughs) That's a really cool quote. So what's next for you?

Pawlikowski: I'm working on another film. It's called The Restraint of Beasts. For a change, it's about five men.

My Summer of Love charity screening
Rating: R21 (Mature Theme)
Date: 16 October 2006 (Monday)
Time: 9 pm
Venue: GV VivoCity, No 1, Harbourfront Walk
Price: USD$20 (approx. S$30)
Book online

For information and ticket reservations, call Rodin or Tiffany at 62762132 from 10am-7pm. If you are unable to attend the screening but wish to make cash donations to AWARE and the CWS, you may do so through the Fridae Shop.

Singapore

Reader's Comments

1. 2006-11-02 13:25  
Thanks for the interview, I loved it. Minor spelling amendment - it's "Manichean", not "Mancihean".
2. 2006-11-02 13:25  
Thanks for the interview, I loved it. Minor spelling amendment - it's "Manichean", not "Mancihean".

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