(500) Days of Summer

My little excursion to my uni, which I only in fact go to a handful of times a year, being a part-time distance learner, finished with the first of the film society's screenings, for which they chose (500) Days of Summer, a sleeper indie hit from last year. It cost only a £1 suggested donation to RAG, and was adorable Joseph Gordon-Levett's return to the public eye, so I thought, 'Why not?' A quirky but dark-edged romantic comedy sounded good.

But the film was at best a little above average. Worth seeing, but I find myself with a sour taste in my mouth, and not just because of one of the cheesiest pieces of closing dialogue of any film ever. It was just overall quite irritating.

The trouble was that it didn't seem to have an original idea in it. It was one of an increasingly irritating batch of pseudo-arthouse films, I think deriving from Amelie (where it was just about pulled off) in which the exposition is very quirky: multiple layers of reality, pastiche, words appearing in the air and jumpy chronology. These films then settle into being utterly conventional, throwing in token bits of oddness later as if abruptly remembered, to masquerade as something artsy. This film at least throws in surreal pastiches, but all its flourishes have been done better elsewhere. There have been better sequences of a guy getting some and the next day breaking into a big choreographed dance number to express happiness. There have been better send-ups of French noir films and Bergman. We've seen little kids as inappropriate sources of wisdom and vulgarity. We've seen films that have non-linear narratives juxtapose opposite lines from the same character. It all felt so tired. The one thing I'll probably remember from this is the characters playing about in an Ikea, pretending it was their real home...but I will remember it as intensely irritating.

And the fact that the whole film is about an obviously one-sided, doomed relationship gives it an inevitability that soon becomes ponderous. Summer is very obviously not right for Tom, because she doesn't see him in anything like the same way he sees her. This should be obvious to any of the friends he confides in, especially when he's in a mess, and he just needs a good talking to on why it was never what he thought it was, and never would be. She turns out to be grossly insensitive and poor Tom only gets closure when forced into it. Of course when you break up with someone, reason never works very well, and it's easy to identify with Tom, but I kept wondering where his friends were. The result of him getting closure rather unwillingly is that the final scene comes too abruptly and rings rather hollow.

This is not a terrible film, and even though he's given such weird scenes and dialogue at the start that I thought his character was autistic, Gordon-Levitt puts in a solid performance and remains likeable and engaging even when acting like a brat. Minor characters like the friends and the boss are natural and fit the film well. Summer is awful but that's only testament to how well-acted it was. No complaints there, only with the writing, direction and limited scope.