Tagline: This is not a love story.
 "But
This is a story about love
In a distraught scene that comes late in the movie, Tom Hansen (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) says, ÒWhy do people buy these things? It's
not cos they want to say how they feel. People buy cards because
they can't say what they feel.Ó And that is why (500) Days
Of Summer is the perfect film of how we have all felt, at least
once, of falling in love in our early 20s with someone we felt was
perfect, but wasn't.
The film charts the 500-day relationship between Tom Hansen and
Summer Fin (Zooey Deschanel). The movie presents those days in random
order, sort of a romantic flipbook, so that we keep skipping forward
and back. Tom Hansen is a greeting-card writer and frustrated architect
in a relationship with his office mate Summer Fin. Tom grows up
(listening to sad British pop music and obsessing over The Graduate)
believing that he'd never truly be happy until the day he met Òthe
one.Ó Summer - after her parents' early divorce - only loves
two things: her long dark hair and was how easily she could cut
it off and not feel a thing. Tom has been in love with Summer from
the moment he saw her. She likes his looks, and makes her move one
day over the Xerox machine. Can he accept that she simply likes
him for now, not for forever?
In a wonderful performance, the always likable Gordon-Levitt (who
at certain angles looks unbelievably like the late Heath Ledger,
his co-star in 10 Things I Hate About You) hurls himself into moments.
Whether its receiving a dreamed-of first kiss or angrily weeping
through a karaoke massacre, he runs the emotion gamut from being
hopeful and in love to being disgusted and extremely hurt. Deschanel,
with her sexy-slurry delivery and electric-blue eyes, remains unreadable
and embodies the girl who has the ability to madden you with admiration,
who hits the centre of the target without trying. Her elusiveness
makes her moments of vulnerability all the more effective. She convinces
the audience of not only Summer's charm, but also her uniqueness,
making no mystery of why Tom falls so hard.
There are so many ways in which (500) Days of Summer seems too clever
for its own good: it's packed with oddball and not-so-odd pop-culture
references (at one point a character struggles to remember how the
Knight Rider theme song goes); the banter between the characters
is breezy but often in a meticulous, self-conscious way; and, perhaps
worst of all, we're guided through this modern-day saga of longing
and heartbreak by a too-helpful narrator. "You should know
upfront," he tells us upfront. "This is not a love story."
Whatever happened to trusting an audience to get the point for itself,
without an accompanying instruction manual?
But everything that's wrong, on the surface, with (500) Days of
Summer pales in light of everything
that's going on beneath its surface. There's an air of mournfulness,
of bewilderment at the ways love can do us wrong, that rescues (500)
Days of Summer from utter cuteness. If the movie - which was directed
by newcomer Marc Webb and written by Scott Neustadter and Michael
H. Weber - is at times overly calculated, in the end it manages
to hit the core of what it means to have every romantic hope dashed.
It also pinpoints the exact moment when those hopes mysteriously
start to rebuild themselves, seemingly of their own accord, usually
at the very moment we just can't live with our own gloom anymore.
Ð Ali Sultan
*YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
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