Don't let the saccharine title fool you. "My Summer of Love" isn't your garden variety seasonal romance, nor the hothouse kind -- but it's very hot. This tale of intoxication, based on a Helen Cross novel and set in the fertile romantic soil of the Yorkshire countryside, is infused with the intrigue and passions of two sexually charged young women, luminously performed by two steamy newcomers.

	Natalie Press, left, and Emily Blunt play two young English women who fill a void in each other's lives in "My Summer of Love." Click photo for larger image. "My Summer of Love" Rating: R for sexuality, language and some drug use. Starring: Natalie Press, Emily Blunt, Paddy Considine. Director: Pawel Pawlikowski. "My Summer of Love" Web site

Working-class Mona (Natalie Press) yearns for something better than the crude seduced-and-abandoned sex that passes for her love life and the drab reality that has led her big brother Phil (Paddy Considine) to trade in his sinful past for a born-again religious fervor that his sister doesn't share.

Mona's rapture will come from a diva, not the divine: gorgeous, exotic Tasmin (Emily Blunt), the haughty, spoiled, upper-crust girl who lives nearby in a huge old manse, alone -- or at least unsupervised -- in the wake of her mother's and sister's deaths. Mona encounters Tasmin playing Saint-Saens' "The Swan" on the cello (al fresco) and is dazzled by her brainy beauty and charisma: Tam's pronouncements on God, love and the universe are not so much sentences as cryptic manifestos, peppered with allusions to Wagner, Shakespeare and Freud.

There could be no more polar opposites than these two girls, but their initial mutual wariness quickly turns into mutual fascination, attraction -- and exploration. We fall in love with them as they fall in love with each other, smoking and drinking and dancing and -- visually best of all -- taking a psychedelic mushroom trip that is rendered entirely in images! Be it Tam's mansion or Mona's favorite swimming hole, they share each other's secret inner and outer worlds. When they finally lie down in the grass for the seduction scene, it is so subtle we see nothing but a puff of cigarette smoke.

"If you leave me, I'll kill you," Tam declares, with the overdramatic intensity of a D.H. Lawrence character from "Women in Love." She seems to really mean it.

"If you leave me, I'll kill you -- and then kill myself," Mona replies.

Even more powerful (and meaningful) is Tam's riveting breakdown, during which she recounts her beloved sister Sadie's demise from anorexia. That -- and a subsequent seance with Sadie -- become even more significant later, along with their seriocomic guerrilla warfare against rotten men in general. Mona does a great, wicked imitation of how males have sex and an even funnier-scarier one of Linda Blair's devil-possession in "The Exorcist."

That latter turn pertains to the perfectly integrated subplot in which Phil and his evangelical sect are busy fashioning and erecting a gigantic hilltop cross for a re-enacted crucifixion that heralds Phil's own, soon to come.

Director Pawel Pawlikowski (much acclaimed for his similarly lush, naturalistic "Last Resort" in 2000) is a master storyteller, most masterful with characterizations. From Press, Blunt and Considine he gets superb performances. From the music (and life) of Edith Piaf, he gets a fine framing-device continuo. From Cross' story and dialogue he gets maximum tension and imparts the increasingly unsettling feeling that this thing could go in any direction -- drama, romance, horror-thriller, black comedy -- up to the last minute of its double-twist ending.

"My Summer of Love," opening today at Manor Theater, is a non-conformist, non-mainstream but tremendously entertaining work of poetic realism, full of mischief and mystery about freedom (and free expression). "Lesbian love?" Less "lesbian" than thespian. Less "love" than liberation. Less sexuality than sensuality.

More reason to see it.