These days, Emily Blunt can be found in various Hollywood blockbusters, lending herself to the horror franchise A Quiet Place, action movies like Edge of Tomorrow and Sicario, and more recently, the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer.

 The actor gravitates towards expansive productions that practically guarantee box office success, but at the start of her career, she dazzled with a performance in an overlooked British film.

Before she truly broke into Hollywood with an unforgettable role in The Devil Wears Prada, playing the snobbish assistant Emily, the star was cast in 2004’s My Summer of Love. 

Directed by Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, who went on to find further success with the Oscar-winning Ida and the Oscar-nominated Cold War, the film takes us to rural West Yorkshire for a twisted tale of friendship, class, and romance.

Blunt plays Tamsin, a well-off teenage girl who meets Mona, played by Natalie Press (who appeared in the Oscar-winning short film Wasp by Andrea Arnold the year prior), a working-class girl.

The two teenagers are from strikingly different backgrounds, with Tamsin living in a huge house while Mona only has her brother, a criminal-turned-religious preacher, with whom she lives above a pub.

Yet, when they happen to meet one summer, the two form an unlikely friendship that suggests that, in the grand scheme of things, class doesn’t really matter.

Or does it? Pawlikowski’s film isn’t that one-dimensional, for this isn’t simply a tale of a sapphic relationship between two girls from opposing ends of the class spectrum – it’s a film about class.

The filmmaker deconstructs different elements of capitalist society, like a perfect nuclear family unit and the dedication to religion, offering us a world where class barriers can seemingly be easily torn down through the power of teenage connection and a shared feeling of dissatisfaction.

Yet Pawlikowski twists our expectations and uses a Marxist lens to explore the innate differences between the two characters, whose relationship is doomed from the very beginning because of them.

Can the working class and the upper class live harmoniously together? Pawlikowski asks. With fairytale imagery, such as Tamsin riding a horse and living in a castle-like house, the filmmaker presents a sour version of what could be, for Mona, a perfect summer.

Blunt is great in her role as the manipulative and cunning Tamsin, possessing an effortless sense of grace as she rides her horse, smokes, paints her nails, swims in the lake, and offers up stories about her secretly troubled home life.

When you watch the film, it feels unsurprising that Blunt would then go on to land lots of excellent supporting roles and impressive leading parts; it might have been her first movie role, but she shows a talent that is far more seasoned.

Sure, she’d appeared in a few television shows and theatre productions before she landed the role in My Summer of Love, but here she was given more space to demonstrate her talents, stealing practically every scene.

The movie went on to win a Bafta for ‘Outstanding British Film’, although it has since faded into relative obscurity. Yet, Blunt is a tour-de-force here, quietly roaming the Yorkshire countryside for prey.