Originally posted on www.passionforcinema.com on November 10, 2009
This isn’t a story about a normal guy meeting a normal girl. This is about a normal guy meeting a classy, sexy female. And this changes a lot in the dynamics between them. The pointer of the control exuded doesn’t shift from one to the other. It constantly is pointing towards the female. It may be the same when a normal girl meets classy hunk, but I will be the last person to have any opinion on that. Thinking on those lines is out of my territory. While on the other hand, I am a living testament of the guy’s perspective in a certain ‘one sided’ or ‘can’t be labeled’ relationship with an awe inducing female. And 500 Days Of Summer is precisely that and also how basic gender behavioral differences surface out in a relationship and create a wreck.
At the start of the film itself the movie acknowledges the fact that Summer, the female in question, is no ordinary female. The store she worked in during her college reported a steep rise in sales, the bus in which she travelled shows rise in passengers travelling by that route and she always gets a good discount on the house rent wherever she stays. That is the Summer effect. She is influential. And tell me, aren’t there such females around us? There surely are. They are devastatingly good looking. And just their affable smiles would make all the males go weak in their knees. This is much like the exaggeration we see in Hindi movies, and especially in Farah khan movies. Summer (Zooey Deschanel) exudes such charm and commands eyeballs around her. Unfortunately and unfairly she joins an office where Tom, the guy in question, has been working for 2 years. And from hereon starts the frustrating journey of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) with Summer.
The overused ‘You know, we can be really good friends’ line is not used in this film as just a joke. It is used for what it really is, and what a guy feels on hearing it. It is an easy cop out for females, who are scared to put across some things bluntly. ‘I don’t like you in that way.’ Why don’t females understand, there are no two ways for guys, its either you like them or you don’t like them. Guys don’t understand this way and that way. Especially when they are betting their lives on your answer. They don’t want to be your good friends, they want to be your boyfriend or else move on with life. They can’t be two people at the same time, pretending to be good friends and burning inside with attraction or whatever that overpowering feeling is called. I know you don’t want to hurt them by telling them things too frankly, but please think of something new to say next time when a guy comes begging for your affection, don’t pull off ‘good friends’ or ‘not in that way’.
The gender behavioral differences that I referred to earlier comes in play when Summer tells Tom “We should stop seeing each other” while they are sitting in a restaurant. Tom is devastated and Summer is well aware of the repercussions her sentence could have. The ordered pancakes arrive. Now Summer, to avoid any arguments, nonchalantly says “Wow, the pancakes look good. Lets finish the pancakes and then talk.” Tom looks down on his food and is simply disgusted by the sight of the pancakes. The point I’m arriving at is that females are much more capable of putting up a façade while ruminating inside on some other thing. Especially when in critical situations. Males on the other hand find it rather difficult to pull of such duality. Tom gets so disgusted on hearing the pancake line that he just gets up and blasts away from the table.
500 Days of Summer essentially charts 500 days of Tom in ‘love’ with Summer. The narrative is beautifully structured non-linearly, oscillating between the good days and the bad days. Roger Ebert very superbly explains the essence of this narrative structure in his review.
“We never remember in chronological order, especially when we’re going back over a failed romance. We start near the end, and then hop around between the times that were good and the times that left pain. People always say “start at the beginning,” but we didn’t know at the time it was the beginning.”
The film surely is a truthful account of a guys perspective in relationships which they get into when they are in their early twenties. I myself can safely vouch for that. It is heartbreaking too, when certain notions and expectations, which are ingrained through popular movies, are shattered and life happens. But the film falters whenever it opts for the popular rom-com strokes to advance the story. The film is actually trying to revolt against these romantic movies, and it irks me and saddens me to see the film employing those very ploys to derive the character interactions. I’m not able to recollect any particular scene to exemplify my point, but I could very much feel those ‘popular’ undercurrents which occasionally popped out as glaring spikes. Now, contradictorily, as I replay the movie in my head I question myself, were the scenes with some real substance and truth the occasional spikes in an otherwise popular rom-com format, or was it the other way around. The core of the movie is so close to me that I am hell-bent on believing the latter. But I have no doubts in saying that the last scene betrays the whole theme of the movie and is surely dumbed down to clichéd.
Note to all the twenty something guys: If ever you have felt like a loser in presence of a female, this film may climb up right into your all time favorites.
This isn’t a story about a normal guy meeting a normal girl. This is about a normal guy meeting a classy, sexy female. And this changes a lot in the dynamics between them. The pointer of the control exuded doesn’t shift from one to the other. It constantly is pointing towards the female. It may be the same when a normal girl meets classy hunk, but I will be the last person to have any opinion on that. Thinking on those lines is out of my territory. While on the other hand, I am a living testament of the guy’s perspective in a certain ‘one sided’ or ‘can’t be labeled’ relationship with an awe inducing female. And 500 Days Of Summer is precisely that and also how basic gender behavioral differences surface out in a relationship and create a wreck.
At the start of the film itself the movie acknowledges the fact that Summer, the female in question, is no ordinary female. The store she worked in during her college reported a steep rise in sales, the bus in which she travelled shows rise in passengers travelling by that route and she always gets a good discount on the house rent wherever she stays. That is the Summer effect. She is influential. And tell me, aren’t there such females around us? There surely are. They are devastatingly good looking. And just their affable smiles would make all the males go weak in their knees. This is much like the exaggeration we see in Hindi movies, and especially in Farah khan movies. Summer (Zooey Deschanel) exudes such charm and commands eyeballs around her. Unfortunately and unfairly she joins an office where Tom, the guy in question, has been working for 2 years. And from hereon starts the frustrating journey of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) with Summer.
The overused ‘You know, we can be really good friends’ line is not used in this film as just a joke. It is used for what it really is, and what a guy feels on hearing it. It is an easy cop out for females, who are scared to put across some things bluntly. ‘I don’t like you in that way.’ Why don’t females understand, there are no two ways for guys, its either you like them or you don’t like them. Guys don’t understand this way and that way. Especially when they are betting their lives on your answer. They don’t want to be your good friends, they want to be your boyfriend or else move on with life. They can’t be two people at the same time, pretending to be good friends and burning inside with attraction or whatever that overpowering feeling is called. I know you don’t want to hurt them by telling them things too frankly, but please think of something new to say next time when a guy comes begging for your affection, don’t pull off ‘good friends’ or ‘not in that way’.
The gender behavioral differences that I referred to earlier comes in play when Summer tells Tom “We should stop seeing each other” while they are sitting in a restaurant. Tom is devastated and Summer is well aware of the repercussions her sentence could have. The ordered pancakes arrive. Now Summer, to avoid any arguments, nonchalantly says “Wow, the pancakes look good. Lets finish the pancakes and then talk.” Tom looks down on his food and is simply disgusted by the sight of the pancakes. The point I’m arriving at is that females are much more capable of putting up a façade while ruminating inside on some other thing. Especially when in critical situations. Males on the other hand find it rather difficult to pull of such duality. Tom gets so disgusted on hearing the pancake line that he just gets up and blasts away from the table.
500 Days of Summer essentially charts 500 days of Tom in ‘love’ with Summer. The narrative is beautifully structured non-linearly, oscillating between the good days and the bad days. Roger Ebert very superbly explains the essence of this narrative structure in his review.
“We never remember in chronological order, especially when we’re going back over a failed romance. We start near the end, and then hop around between the times that were good and the times that left pain. People always say “start at the beginning,” but we didn’t know at the time it was the beginning.”
The film surely is a truthful account of a guys perspective in relationships which they get into when they are in their early twenties. I myself can safely vouch for that. It is heartbreaking too, when certain notions and expectations, which are ingrained through popular movies, are shattered and life happens. But the film falters whenever it opts for the popular rom-com strokes to advance the story. The film is actually trying to revolt against these romantic movies, and it irks me and saddens me to see the film employing those very ploys to derive the character interactions. I’m not able to recollect any particular scene to exemplify my point, but I could very much feel those ‘popular’ undercurrents which occasionally popped out as glaring spikes. Now, contradictorily, as I replay the movie in my head I question myself, were the scenes with some real substance and truth the occasional spikes in an otherwise popular rom-com format, or was it the other way around. The core of the movie is so close to me that I am hell-bent on believing the latter. But I have no doubts in saying that the last scene betrays the whole theme of the movie and is surely dumbed down to clichéd.
Note to all the twenty something guys: If ever you have felt like a loser in presence of a female, this film may climb up right into your all time favorites.
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