And so they dance the first time they meet, at the wedding of her mother and his uncle. They dance because they’re thrown into each other’s company by an embarrassing coincidence: Her husband and his wife have slipped out of the party and are no doubt up to no good at that very moment. They dance, they tell each other little things about themselves, and a sudden, healthy, sensual affection is born. The missing couple returns, and there are awkward and subtly hilarious introductions. And then the two—their names are Marthe and Ludovic—arrange to meet again. There is no doubt at all, of course, that they’re in love. But they don’t sleep together for quite a long time, partly because what they have is so unexpected and precious that they want to savor it. When they do publicly declare their love (and their love affair), they do it within the family setting. And everyone seems to reach an accommodation with the new arrangement (it’s here that the affair is especially impossible—but who cares?).
There are scenes that remind us of love affairs in other movies, except that Cousin Cousine handles them so honestly and refreshingly: checking into a small hotel, for example, or eating breakfast in bed. We gradually figure out what makes these little moments so charming. Ludovic and Marthe are adults. They are not glowing Hollywood youths trapped in some dumb contemporary story. They’re not Great Lovers. They’re unaffected, physical, healthy people who take a direct delight in the fact of each other’s existence.
One of my friends says Love Story was a great aphrodisiac. Another one says Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others provided convincing arguments for engaged couples to think again about marriage. Cousin Cousine falls between those two films; it’s an aphrodisiac encouraging married couples to think about other engagements.
500 Days of Summer
PG-13, 95 m., 2009
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tom Hansen), Zooey Deschanel (Summer Finn), Geoffrey Arend (McKenzie), Matthew Gray Gubler (Paul), Chloe Grace Moretz (Rachel Hansen), Clark Gregg (Vance), Rachel Boston (Alison), Minka Kelly (Girl). Directed by Marc Webb and produced by Jessica Tuchinsky, Mark Waters, Mason Novick, and Steven J. Wolfe. Screeplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
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. 500 Days of Summer is a movie that works that way.
Some say they’re annoyed by the way it begins on Day 488 or whatever and then jumps around, providing utterly unhelpful data labels: “Day 1,” “Day 249.” Movies are supposed to reassure us that events unfold in an orderly procession. But Tom remembers Summer as a series of joys and bafflements. What kind of woman likes you perfectly sincerely and has no one else in her life but is not interested in ever getting married?
Zooey Deschanel is a good choice to play such a woman. I can’t imagine her playing a clinging vine. Too ornery. As Summer, she sees Tom with a level gaze and is who she is. It’s Tom’s bad luck she is sweet and smart and beautiful—it’s not an act. She is always scrupulously honest with him. She is her own person, and Tom can’t have her. Have you known someone like that? In romance, we believe what we want to believe. That’s the reason 500 Days of Summer is so appealing.
Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is in love with Summer from the moment he sees her. His thoughts on love may not run as deeply as, say, those of the Romantic poets. He writes greeting cards, and you suspect he may believe his own cards. It’s amazing people get paid for a job like that. I could do it: “Love is a rose, and you are its petals.” Summer is his new assistant. He needs an assistant in this job? She likes his looks and makes her move one day over the Xerox machine.
Can he accept that she simply likes him for now, not for forever? The movie, which is a delightful comedy, alive with invention, is about Tom wrestling with that reality. The director, Marc Webb, seems to be casting about for templates from other movies to help him tell this story; that’s not desperation but playfulness. There’s a little black-and-white, a little musical number, a little Fellini, which is always helpful in evoking a man in the act of yearning. Tom spends this movie in the emotional quandary of Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita, his hand always outstretched toward his inaccessible fantasies.
Summer remains mysterious all through the film, perhaps because we persist with Tom in expecting her to cave in. When we realize she is not required to in this movie because it’s not playing by the Hollywood rules, we perk up; anything could happen. The kaleidoscopic time structure breaks the shackles of the three-act grid and thrashes about with the freedom of romantic confusion.
One thing men love is to instruct women. If a woman wants to enchant a man, she is wise to play his pupil. Men fall for this. Tom set out in life to be an architect, not a poet of greeting cards. He and Summer share the same favorite view of Los Angeles (one you may not have seen before), and he conducts for her an architectural tour. This is fun not because we get to see wonderful buildings, but because so rarely in the movies do we find characters arguing for their aesthetic values. What does your average character played by an A-list star believe about truth and beauty? Has Jason Bourne ever gone to a museum on his day off?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt has acted in a lot of movies, ranging from one of the Halloween sequels to the indie gem Brick. He comes into focus here playing a believable, likable guy, hopeful, easily disappointed, a little Tom Hanksian. He is strong enough to expect love, weak enough to be hurt. Zooey Deschanel evokes that ability in some women to madden you with admiration while never seeming to give it the slightest thought. She also had that quality in the overlooked Gigantic (2008), although the movie’s peculiar supporting characters obscured it.
Tom opens the film by announcing it will not be your typical love story. Are you like me, and when you realize a movie is on autopilot you get impatient with it? How long can the characters pretend they don’t know how the story will end? Here is a rare movie that begins by telling us how it will end, and is about how the hero has no idea why.
Note: The movie’s poster insists the title is (500) Days of Summer. Led by Variety, every single film critic I could find has simply ignored that. Good for them.
Flirting
R, 102 m., 1992
Noah Taylor (Danny Embling), Thandie Newton (Thandie Adjewa), Nicole Kidman (Nicola Radcliffe), Bartholomew Rose (“Gilby Fryer”), Felix Nobis (Jock Blair), Josh Picker (“Baka” Bourke), Kiri Paramore (“Slag” Green). Directed by John Duigan and produced by George Miller, Doug Mitchell, and Terry Hayes. Screenplay by Duigan.
Flirting is one of those rare movies with characters I cared about intensely. I didn’t simply observe them on the screen; I got involved in their decisions and hoped they made the right ones. The movie is about two teenagers at private schools in Australia in the 1960s, a white boy and an African girl, who fall in love and do a little growing up, both at the same time.
The boy is Danny (Noah Taylor), awkward, a stutterer, the target of jokes from some of his classmates. He has a fine offbeat mind, which questions authority and doubts conventional wisdom. He is gawky in that way teenage boys can be before the parts grow into harmony with the whole. The girl is Thandie (Thandie Newton), very pretty, very smart, attracted to Danny because alone of the boys in her world he possesses a sense of humor and rebellion. She first sees him during a get-together between their twin schools, which are on either side of a lake, and looks at him boldly until he meets her gaze. Not long after, they are on opposing debate teams, and carry on a subtle little flirtation by disagreeing with the arguments of their own sides.