(500) Days of Summer

08/07/2009
(This picture is vaguely of summer, and has nothing to do with the film!)
I got invited to a blogger’s screening of this film next week but couldn’t make it – so I saw a separate screening and I’m really glad I did.
Superficially this is light-hearted romantic film, but it’s really not. A voiceover at the start of the film pretty much puts you straight on this, although you never know quite whether to believe the voiceover (it’s a deep throaty one rather than one of the characters). But an “Author’s note” sets you straight too. Somebody got hurt badly when they were dumped. At that someone was co-writer Scott Neustadter. He says as much in his piece in the production notes.
The “Summer” of the title isn’t the season but Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), an assistant that Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets in his workplace – a greetings card manufacturer. He’s an architect by trade but has slipped into the card business where his job is to dream up the words in cards for previously un-heard of card occasions.
He has his two male friends – one a co-worker who he goes karaoke singing with – who are there to help him through his difficulties.
You see the thing is that we know this relationship isn’t going anywhere. The film’s timeline spins around and we very quickly learn that for no obvious reason, Finn dumps Hansen. From there, we swing back and forth through good times and bad, as we learn how the relationship was formed and what happened to end it.
Throughout the film there are flash backs to the earlier lives of the characters, although an unusual licence has been used to place those characters in the correct timeline. The opening credits run across cine camera footage of our two main characters, yet given that they’d have grown up in the eighties you’d expect video footage rather than Super-8. Then another flashback to an incident seems to be placed in the fifties or sixties for no real reason. Somehow it just works.
Other techniques are used through the film. There’s a dance number at one point, just after a very happy Hansen has been high-fiving strangers in the street and brilliantly at one point looks in a car window to check the reflection of himself and sees a beaming Han Solo smiling back at him. And during another sequence we get a split screen with what Hansen hoped would happen alongside the “reality” of it.
The music in the film is great by the way. Although Hansen seems too young for it (Gordon-Levitt is 28), he seems to be heavily into music like The Smiths and Joy Division. He has an endless selection of T-shirts for said artists, and early in their relationship Finn and Hansen compare notes on The Smiths. And somebody really loves The Boy With the Arab Strap by Belle and Sebastian. I’m really looking forward to the soundtrack. And at one point Deschanel sings a song herself during a karaoke sequence. Of course we know she can sing because she released an excellent album, She and Him, last year (she also appears on the soundtrack of Yes Man I understand).
Anyway, it’s out on 4th September, and it’ll be well worth seeing. The official website is here.


Posted

in

Tags: