Quotes of the Day

British filmmakers are creatures of habit. Dipping into the same creative pool over and over again, they tend to make theme-by-numbers films, powerful but predictable cinema that does the job while offering up few surprises. To much of the world, a British film means one of four things: East end gangster shoot-em-up, bustle-and-lace period piece, gritty council estate drama or pop-laced romantic comedy.

Thankfully, Pawel Pawlikowski is a traitor. He's made My Summer of Love, a smart, sexy, stylish look at the blossoming relationship between two 16-year-old girls in the Yorkshire countryside. Mona is blue collar, awkward, with an abusive boyfriend and an older brother who, just out of prison, has fervently found religion. Tamsin is rich, beautiful, lonely. When we first see her, she rides up to Mona on a white horse; a twist on the fairytale that hints at the playful romance to come. Over the summer they become best friends and then lovers, until real life tears their fantasy apart.

Formally, My Summer of Love is based on Helen Cross's 2001 novel of the same name. But after stripping down the narrative, introducing the character of Mona's brother and removing all the other characters to push the girls to center-screen, Pawlikowski has made the story all his own. "I didn't even set it in today's world," the 46-year-old director says. "The girls in the film are old-fashioned sort of people. Young people today are constantly listening to things and watching things and comparing things. I can't imagine them actually falling in love or noticing anybody with this permanent bombardment of images and information."

His two leads — both with little experience in front of the camera, both remarkable — take it one step further, creating their own little world within the director's: one built on adoring glances, tentative kisses and whispered confessions. Natalie Press and Emily Blunt are so convincing as the mutually infatuated Mona and Tamsin that watching them together often feels like a perverse intrusion.

With its gauzy tones and stark summer colors, My Summer of Love is dreamy and airy, more common with the films of the Continent — Italy, Spain, Sweden — than any coming out of Britain. Pawlikowski, who was born in Poland and moved to London when he was 15, puts his light touch down to always being a little bit lost: "I came here as a foreigner and couldn't speak a word of English. And I was fascinated. I travel a lot and I transform things in my own head and observe things as an outsider would."

Although he's never been one to pull in the crowds, Pawlikowski's earned a reputation for infusing very British subjects with a European sensibility. First there were his award-winning documentaries, like From Moscow to Pietushki, about alcoholic Russian writer Benedict Yerofeyev, and Dostoevsky's Travels, which follows the novelist's great-grandson as he searches for a second-hand white Mercedes.

Then he decided to try his hand at features. His first, Moscow-based love story The Stringer (1998), came and went unnoticed. But his second made a mark: 2000's Last Resort, is about a Russian woman and her young son who come to Britain seeking asylum and end up at a makeshift refugee limbo in the dreary seaside town of Margate. With that film, Pawlikowski showed he could take a deserted fairground and turn it into an eerie otherworldly plane. He could take a down-and-out loser (the kindly arcade owner played by Paddy Considine) and turn him into a hero. And he could take a refugee drama and turn it into a story about people instead of politics.

Viewers who thought Last Resort was about asylum seekers were, he says, missing the point. "All these nice liberal critics were over-praising it and then some right-wing critics attacked it and everyone was using it as a kind of football for global debate," he says. "The great political achievement of that film, I was hoping, would be to show foreigners as normal and interesting. Just to make people fall in love with somebody who's not like them, but who's equally human, if not more, and equally complicated, if not more."

My Summer of Love could fall victim to the same misunderstandings. On the surface, it may look like a film about two girls making out with each other, but you don't have to dig too deep to find that it's really about two very different people who see in each other what they think is missing from themselves. They each fall for the possibility of each other, but it's the reality that destroys them. When it was released in Britain in October, the film had critics hailing Pawlikowski as the savior of British cinema (which no doubt helped it recently win the Outstanding British Film BAFTA award). But audiences weren't so seduced. Maybe when it opens in Poland on April 15 as it makes its way across Europe, more people will be taken in by this warm, clever, mesmerizing film. But even if they aren't, at least they'll get to glimpse a rare species — a British film that works without guns, grit, ruffled collars or floppy-haired charmers.

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• With his ethereal third feature, My Summer of Love, Pawel Pawlikowski does British cinema a favor