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Monday, December 21, 2009

BD impressions: (500) Days of Summer

2:06 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

The voice-over at the start of (500) Days of Summer assures us that "this is not a love story", but on reflection, I can't quite work out what it else was meant to be. Essentially a tale about a romantic falling head over heels for a cynic, their relationship and eventual break-up, I'm not convinced it breaks as much new ground as its makers believed. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel give fine performances as the romantic and the cynic respectively, and I'll admit that there does seem to be something of a gender reversal going on (I've tended to find that, in romantic comedies, the cynic is usually the male lead while his female counterpart is the starry-eyed idealist). It's also rather funny, albeit in the "quiet titter" sort of way rather than being laugh-out-loud hysterical. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's superior Amelie is a clear point of reference with its daydreams, cutaways and observations about seemingly trivial little details that help make the characters complete, but whereas Amelie actually seemed to tell a complete and satisfying story, there's something frustratingly disjointed about (500) Days of Summer. The film is told out of sequence, jumping back and forth throughout the five hundred days in which Deschanel's character, Summer, is in the life of Gordon-Levitt's Tom, sometimes for dramatic effect (there's a brilliant moment where we cut from Tom heading to work, early in the relationship and on top of the world, to him arriving depressed and dishevelled later on after things have gone south), but more often than not the result is that the film feels fragmented and episodic.

The filmmakers don't even seem to be able to commit to the refreshingly cynical outlook that they initially convey through Summer, disavowing such nonsense concepts as fate, destiny and soul-mates, only to embrace them completely in a tacked-on coda that half-heartedly tries to tell us that these things do exist, just not in the places we're looking for them. Had they actually followed through on the initial premise, I suspect I'd hold the film in higher regard. As it stands, though, it's ultimately little more than a slightly offbeat romcom about a man who dresses like a douche (seriously, who goes to the cinema wearing a tie and a cardigan?) and the charmingly quirky object of his affections.

Image quality: Barring the elevated blacks that make many of the lower lit scenes appear murky and washed out, this is a superlative BD release. Detail is excellent, compression is faultless, and yadda yadda yadda, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to come up with new ways of saying "There's nothing wrong with it." Bravo, Fox. 9.5/10

(500) Days of Summer
studio: 20th Century Fox; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 28.4 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 42.89 Mbit/sec

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