Shots in the dark: three new British films reveal the power of love … to wreak havoc

"Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with?" From a great 1978 Buzz-cocks single, that rueful rhetorical question--whined by Pete Shelley as if he's hurtling toward a car crash---could serve as a mantra for three new British films. In each of My Summer of Love, 9 Songs, and Asylum, someone does fall in love with someone they shouldn't've fallen in love with, for the sake of their own sanity.

These movies don't constitute a trend, just the latest fanfare of howls about the tendency of love--and its Machiavellian accomplice, sex--to do damage. Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love is a lyrical but skeptical inquiry into the durability of romantic faith as seen from the perspective of a working-class Yorkshire lass. Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs dispassionately scrutinizes a fling through a young couple's sexual trysts and the rock concerts they go to. And David Mackenzie's visually morose Asylum depicts a woman's uncontrollable desire for a murderer who is being treated at the institution run by her husband. Her sexual sedition is destructive--but then so is the patriarchal system she's rebelling against.

In My Summer of Love, 17-year-old Mona (Natalie Press), artistically gifted and full of inexpressible rage, lives with her puritanical born-again older brother Phil (Paddy Considine) in a converted rural pub. Dumped by her married male lover, she becomes smitten with the posh, pampered Tamsin (Emily Blunt), and they slip into an erotic idyll worthy of Colette.

Tamsin, whose melancholy air masks her narcissism, describes her family life as a tragedy to Mona, and they have fun taking revenge on her apparently adulterous father. But having exposed the fallibility of Phil's religious convictions by tempting him sexually, Tamsin soon exposes herself as a charlatan. What Mona then does to her is a necessary part of her rite of passage. Sunlit and drowsy, Pawlikowski's movie is reminiscent of the summeriest of Eric Rohmer's Moral Tales, but its resort to violence is most un-Rohmer-like. Still, if you can't vent your fury when your first love lets you down, then you may never become whole.

Though there were some explicit sexual images in Patrice Chereau's Anglo-French Intimacy (2001), 9 Songs is the first mainstream British film to include hardcore sex. Running 69 minutes--which is its only joke--the movie intercuts between thirtyish geologist Matt (Kieran O'Brien) and twentyish American student Lisa (Margo Stilley) pleasuring each other in bed, attending gigs at London's Brixton Academy, sharing desultory conversations, and romping on a beach. The sex, unlike in pornography, isn't lit or choreographed to titillate and comes across as banal and functional--to the viewer, if not to the participants. The hot action here is supplied by the likes of Franz Ferdinand and the Dandy Warhols.

Yet this is not an empty exercise. We learn that the affair ended when Lisa returned to America. Whatever she felt for Matt--possibly not much--she is as lost to him as Natalie Portman was to Jude Law at the end of Closer. As Matt ruminates about Lisa, in voiceover, while flying above the barren Antarctic, he can only recall his sensual impressions of her--love, too, is a wasteland when it's over. As slight as it is, 9 Songs leaves the bitter taste that all discarded lovers know.

In Asylum, adapted from Patrick McGrath's novel, love is equated with madness by Peter Cleave (Ian McKellen), an ascetic psychiatrist at a rural hospital for the criminally insane. Soon after Max Raphael (Hugh Bonneville) joins the staff as deputy director, his frustrated wife, Stella (Natasha Richardson), invites the inmate Edgar (Marton Csokas), a sculptor who beheaded and mutilated his wife, to ravish her in a dilapidated greenhouse. She becomes consumed by need for this brooding hunk at the expense of her husband's career and her son. Delighted by this, Cleave manipulates the frenzied lovers for his own malign purposes.

There's an anarchic force in Edgar's virility that medicine and society can barely contain. In Asylum, as in Mackenzie's Young Adam (2003), which also depicts a grim and morally murky world, passion is regenerative; the director judges Stella's antisocial pursuit of love no more than he judged Ewan McGregor's serial seductions in the earlier movie. Was Edgar, the mad artist, the "someone" Stella shouldn't've fallen in love with--or was it Max, the husband who berates and neglects her?. The answer's obvious if you believe in the violence of love--but then it's only a movie.

Graham Fuller is Interview's film writer at large. Above: Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley in 9 Songs. Photo: Courtesy of Tartan Films.

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