I really liked (500) Days of Summer - indeed, I'd go so far as to say that it's perfect.[*] The set-up is simple: boy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets girl (Zooey Deschanel) and they fall into a relationship - but then he falls in love, and she doesn't. But the presentation of the story is less so: it's giddily non-traditional in its zooming back and forth through the 500 days promised by the title, whimsical to the point of tweeness at times, and filled with little cute bits, but also quite determinedly subversion of traditional romance narrative forms - while saving up for the end a message that may just be more romantic than that which typically emerges in those narratives themselves.[**]
I love the way that it has Zooey Deschanel as the perfect girl (only she's not). I love the way that she first notices him as they stand side by side in an elevator and the strains of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" escape from his headphones - and then sings along to it, all natural-like, to him. I love how, at karaoke, she does Nancy (Sinatra) and he does the Pixies - and the utterly believable and sweetly excruciating awkwardness of the bit where she asks him, outside on the road afterwards, whether it's true what his friend said, that he likes her, and he totally lies while being desperate to tell the truth. I love how it's tossed off that she likes "Born to Run" and Rene Magritte and, surely, everything else that a boy might want a girl to like. And I love how perfectly it captures the rush of falling for someone and everything that comes along with and after that initial giddy hope and joy.
At first glance, it seems that the film is set up for the viewer to identify with Tom - and, indeed, I did, in terms of the little things (the way that his clothes fit on him in the same way that mine do on me), the not so little things (the formative impact of gloomy british post-punk music, the devastating effect of the materialisation of a pretty girl who shares many of the same cultural referents and likes as him), and the not little at all things (his assumptions about relationships, love and mutual understanding, and how they're put under stress as the story progresses). But Summer isn't simply some fantasy figure, nor merely archetypal or significant only in terms of how Tom interacts with and relates to her - rather, she's a realistic character in her own right, and, oddly, I see much of her in myself, too.
(And did I mention that it's also very funny, not to mention having a sweet soundtrack?)
This isn't one of those films that's really knocked me off my emotional orbit like, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind did. But it's left an impression on me, and I've taken it a bit to heart - I'm not sure, but I think that maybe I feel about (500) Days of Summer the way that a lot of people (but not me) felt about Garden State. It kind of made me happy and sad in the same proportions; it made me feel and, the which is possibly the more difficult trick for a film like this, it also made me think.
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[*] Perfect, that is, taken on its own terms, of course.
[**] My thinking that its message may, in fact, be more romantic than that legible in its more 'traditional' counterparts is, now that I think about it, very possibly reflective of the extent to which I could, were I so minded, see the development of both Tom and Summer as parallel to my own; an unfortunately extremely piquant illustration which springs to mind is my previously-held view about the more romantic interpretation of the end of Lost in Translation and a particular conversation, a few years back, in which it came up (the record of which I haven't been able to quickly find here in extemporanea).
