A study in romance

Rating: Null/10 (13 October 2009)

It is and it isn't. While the movie claims upfront that it's not a love story (tongue-in-cheek fashion) it is. There isn't even anything particularly unconventional about it, only keener insight.
It is all too easy to be distracted by the not so avant-garde temporally scrambled narration style, starting with Tom's lamenting of his break-up with Summer, and random flashbacks showing scenes in the last 500 days. While it is tempting, it does not worth your effort to try to mentally re-arrange these scenes in proper time sequence to see if the whole thing makes sense. It makes sense anyway, because our mind flashes back randomly, just as Tom's is in the movie.
The focus must be on Summer. Tom, played adorably by empathy-winning Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a perfectly normal young man with normal idealising of love and romance. One could say that the real start of the movie is an office party when a challenge, albeit subconscious, is throw by Tom to Summer that true love exists. The temptation to succumb to cliché is quickly taken care of by telling the audience that both have divorced parents – so forget about that traumatic childhood experience stuff.
Summer obviously doesn't believe in true love and is perfectly honest about it. The attraction of Tom is that he is fun to be with. No more, and certainly no less. It's interesting to note that both of them, on separate and very different occasions, have said the same thing: you are happy, I am happy, so why care about anything else? But the subtexts are polarised opposites. For Tom, it's something like "the future will take its course as our relationship develops and deepens". For Summer, there is no future.
So what kind of a girl is summer? The audience sits through the entire movie trying to figure out (as Tom does), what makes her tick. Played to almost perfection by Zooey Deschanel, Summer is unlike any of the familiar personas such as sweet thing Meg Ryan, sharp wit Reese Witherspoon or lovable neurotic Sandra Bullock. Deachanel is the sort of actor that attracts your attention without having to do much, as she did in a small part, a guitar strumming teacher in "Bridge to Terabithia" (2007). Summer is independent, sensible, honest, fun to be with (yes, she too) but at the same time there is a wall behind which she is hiding something about herself deep down, as Tom puts it. There are only two points in the movie when we get a glimpse of her: when she tells Tom about her childhood fears and aspirations (something she intimated that she never told any body before) and at the Movie "The graduate", the only time we see her tears (but she never quite explained why).
Enough said. This movie should be left to the audience to experience, discover and enjoy. At times, you think you have come tantalizingly close to the simple question I posed about summer "What makes her tick". But in the end, it will be left to each viewer's own interpretation.