Summer Love (Movie Review: 500 days of Summer)

Sure, I downed some bottles of beer, and maybe a few shots of Tequilas, after watching 500 days of Summer, but I truly enjoyed it. In fact, I've seen it twice. Goes to show how much of a masochist I am. 

If you've ever found yourself looking at the fb page of someone you used to love and obsess about, someone you thought you'd love forever, someone you once thought you couldn't live without and find that after all these time what remains are only traces of that pain and obsession, mere fragments of the ache you once suffered for the lost of that one person you thought you'd be spending your whole life with, then you'll know what the movie is talking about. Sure enough, as the disclaimer says at the beginning of the movie, this is not a love story.

Tom(played by Joseph Gordon Levitt) falls head over heels, crazy, madly in love with the alluring and enigmatic Summer (Zooey Deschanel). It's not so hard to believe that men would be falling for the Summer effect given that Zooey seems to have mastered the role of a beautiful and extremely charming woman, floating above everyone's heads, without a care in the world, but to experience everything with such freedom and carelessness. She's so free-spirited and detached from everything else that she doesn't understand how Tom can fall for her when she specifically told him from the start that she didn't want commitment.

But Tom does fall in love and she doesn't end up with him. His heart is broken. He has built his whole life around her and he might as well be dead. So he cries, mopes, wallows, drinks and waits for death.

But he doesn't die and he moves on. Without her. And that is life. One we've all experienced before in one way or another. We fall in love, we have expectations that clash with reality, we get our hearts broken, we suffer extreme pain and then we're alright again. It's such a common story, which is why it's so easily relatable.  Joseph Gordon Levitt plays the hurt guy so well, we almost feel his pain and we want to comfort him and break plates with him.  

The narrative is presented in a non linear manner, jumping around time, showing glimpses from the future and snippets from the past, we don't always know what's going on but we're stimulated and we're curious.  But other than that story-telling technique and the music from the likes of The Smiths, Feist and Regina Spektor, there's nothing really very special about this movie. It tries to have depth and insight, look edgy and smart through overused indie film techniques but all it does is reveal an overdressed movie pretending to be something it's not.

The film's real strength though lies in the simplicity of its story, the innocence and severity of love and how we all move on eventually, whether we like it or not. It may not be a love story, but it sure is a hopeful one.

I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars. Don't see it with a broken heart, though. Or maybe you should