Produced by Chris Collins, Tanya Segatchian Cast: Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine, Dean Andrews, Paul Antony-Barber, Lynette Edwards, Kathryn Summer This hypnotic, character-driven film was selected at the 2004 London and Toronto Film Festivals and opened the 2005 Sydney Film Festival after being awarded the 2005 BAFTA for Best British Film. Evocative and compelling, the film insinuates its way into the world of two very different adolescent Yorkshire country girls who meet and over the course of one summer form a transient, defining relationship of the kind one makes when one is experimenting with the push-pull of inner need, power and independence. Mona (Natalie Press) lives with her brother Phil (Paddy Considine) in a village pub. Phil is a man of extremes. Apparently thinking it’s as easy as pouring spirit(s) out of bottles and Spirit into people, he attempts to convert his violent self into a mild, born-again Christian by converting his erstwhile pub into a spiritual centre where earnest people hold hands and pray out loud with Christian zeal and joy and eyes closed. Partly to escape this alarming situation, Mona rides hilly country lanes on a moped, despite not yet having a motor in it. There, working-class Mona, with her direct, plain way of presenting herself, meets the fascinating, sophisticated and moneyed Tamsin (Emily Blunt), newly suspended from her private girls’ school for being a bad influence and riding a white horse like a princess. The combination proves irresistible to Mona, and when she breaks up with her callous boyfriend, she remembers Tamsin’s open invitation to drop into her ivy-covered mansion anytime, and does. It seems to be a synchronous sign of their differences converging that when Mona walks in to Tamsin’s otherwise silent and empty house, Tamsin is playing Saint-Saens’ The Swan on her cello. Mona’s family pub is named The Swan. The relationship between them is synergistic and catalytic as that between the young girls in Heavenly Creatures. In a heady romantic atmosphere of mood-directed exploration they pose, pout and embrace. Each of them brings out secret desires and hitherto unknown expressions of self in the other that would be otherwise inaccessible. Tamsin spins a seductive web of fantasies centring on a father shagging his secretary and an actress mother away abroad. They dress up in the clothes of Tamsin’s sister who died of anorexia and drink prodigious amount of red wine while Tamsin talks of Nietzsche in a vague sort of way. It’s all for effect, but effect they are trying out as a way of exploring self, going beyond boundaries and conditioning and limitations. It feels intoxicatingly, progressively dangerous, and exhilarating. In the meantime Phil is building an enormous cross to plant on the hill overlooking the village. With a conscious poseur’s keen eye for pretension, Tamsin is convinced he’s a fake and sets out to prove it. Alarmed and angry at Mona’s new preoccupation with the tease Tamsin, Phil forcibly prevents Mona from seeing her. While the incarceration fuels Mona’s passion, it seems to matter less to the fantasist Tamsin, who, after all, was just trying out potential styles. To the unsophisticated Mona, however, it is a devastating betrayal with swift consequences showing how much she has learned by their association. The film is brilliantly textured, not least by the stunning performances of the three leads. Haunting original music scored by Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory provides an evocative mood and the cinematography, both of the lush Yorkshire countryside and shadowed, deep-coloured interiors is rich. There’s a general theme in the characters’ desires to change themselves and go beyond limitations. The methods they employ, consciously and unconsciously, are both original and recognizable. It’s a memorable film of a defining phase in the life of young girls where the most compelling needs are conflicting: love, security and approval with independence and a self-determined style. © Avril Carruthers 11th June 2005
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(9/10)
