For those who have loved and have been dumped, 500 Days of Summer takes the hopeless romantics back in time when their whimsical hearts have been crushed that leaves them holding on to bittersweet memories.
500
Days of Summer casts away all pretensions in a boy-girl relationship in a
funny true-to-life and unique dissection a young man's no-holds-barred love
affair starring Zooey Deschanel (Yes Man) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (G.I.
Joe). In the movie Tom (Levitt)
believes in a lightning-strikes-once kind of love. Summer (Deschanel), on the other hand, doesn't. But such reality doesn't stop Tom from going
after her, again and again.
Day 1 begins when Tom, a would-be
architect turned sappy greeting card writer encounters Summer, though seemingly
out of his league, Tom soon discovers that they have a lot in common.
Fast
forward to day 32, things have moved ahead between them, "casually." Tom is irreparably smitten, living in a
giddy, dreamy world of Summer on his mind.
By day 185, things are in a limbo—the story winds back and forth
through Tom and Summer's on-again, off-again, sometimes blissful, often
tumultuous dalliance. Theirs is a
kaleidoscopic portrait of a relationship from the dizzying stage of
infatuation, dating and sex to separation—the movie then takes us to a whirl
of time jumps, split screens, karaoke numbers and cinematic verve, in a fusion
that tends to engage us as to the why and the how we still struggle so
laughably and cringe so hard to make sense out of the word we call love...and to
hopefully make it real.
Director Marc Webb, who marks his film debut with 500
Days of Summer, lost interest in the romantic comedy genre somewhere
between his puberty stage and when he started paying taxes. But when one day he finally got to read the
work of writers Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, a script that is equally
autobiographical—something clicked. 500 Days of Summer as he found out is about a conjured up relationship
that is both artful and truthful. "We all know Summer because Summer isn't just
a girl. She's an event. I met my first Summer when I was 17. She got me to skip class. At the time, I believed that love was the
magic pill that would connect my soul to the universe," says director Webb.
He further notes that "In
making this movie, my first feature film, it is the happy ending that I didn't
have with Summer. It's a whiff of the
uncynical kid. Because under the humor
and the whimsy of 500 Days of Summer, there's a fundamental truth at play:
yes, love can be cruel, harsh and difficult but it's by far, the best thing
life has to offer."
Playing very soon this October in Metro Manila theaters, 500 Days of Summer is from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.