by SARAH ROWLAND

Riffing on the titular season, My Summer of Love director Paul Pawlikowski creates a lazy, hazy backdrop for his atmospheric lesbian romance. Sun pours through almost every shaft, crack and hairlock in this film, giving the entire screen a crackling warm glow, and the camera angles are as refreshing and beautiful as the young girls themselves.

Freckled beauty Nathalie Press plays Mona, an orphaned Yorkshire yokel who knows her lot in life: get a job at a department store, marry an asshole, squelch out some future criminals and then, as she so eloquently puts it, "wait for menopause." For now, however, she's stuck with her older brother and sole guardian Phil (Paddy Considine), who has just been released from prison where he was transformed from a bar-brawling punter into a vigilante born-again. Determined to save his wayward sister from the evil temptations that loom in the valley they call home, he turns the family pub into an open-house praying centre.

Meanwhile, just up the hill, bored debutante Tamsin (Emily Blunt) has been left to her own devices after being sent home early from prep school for bad behaviour. She roams her family's sprawling estate reading Nietzsche, sipping overpriced wine and looking for trouble, which she recognizes immediately in Mona.

The two disenfranchised teens become inseparable as they spend their summer days cruising the winding countryside roads on Mona's moped, seeking out revenge against the men who have wronged them, crashing community dances and stopping in the fields for some breezy afternoon delight.

Both leads are superbly understated as doomed lovers. Blunt imbues just enough chill in her role for us to question Tamsin's intentions with the free-falling Mona. And Press, whose performance showed strong potential in the Oscar-winning short Wasp, surpasses expectations as Mona. In Wasp she played straight-up white trash. But here, her character has more dimension, possessing an uncultivated intelligence that's wasting away just beneath the surface. We get the feeling that if Mona's life hadn't been plagued with so much hard luck, she wouldn't get such a blank look across her face whenever Tamsin quoted Nietzsche. We also get the feeling that Press is a hot new talent who has only just begun.

My Summer of Love opens at Cinéma du Parc Friday, July 1

>> Movie Listings