271. Summertime

Song - I Want To Know What Love Is (Foreigner)

Movie: Summertime (David Lean, 1955)

There is the famous joke about the man who prays every night to God to let him win the lottery only for God to eventually tell him to buy a lottery ticket. We don't know much about the man, but the joke suggests that he may well be the "son and heir of a a shyness that is criminally vulgar." That's definitely the case for Jane Hudson (Katharine Hepburn), who in Summertime is told: "You are like a hungry child who is given ravioli to eat. 'No', you say, 'I want beefsteak.' My dear girl, you are hungry. Eat the ravioli!". What Jane and the unidentified lottery guy have in common is that their efforts are merely performative and won't have any effect on what they ostensibly seek to achieve. Jane will tell everyone she listens that she's come all the way from Akron, Ohio to Venice to look for the miracle that's been missing in her life, only to run away scared shitless once the miracle (as you may have guessed, the ravioli is indeed a metaphor) stands in front of her. 

In the piece on Shoot the Piano Player, I mentioned that the world conspiring to give you what you want, without you needing to do anything about it, is a shy person's wish fulfilmment fantasy. But there is indeed a more vulgar (as an aside, I Want To Know What Love Is being so high in Radio 2's Top 2000, while How Soon Is Now, or anything else by The Smiths, is entirely missing, is a discussion for another time) shyness that is less about the fear of expressing what you want, than about the fear of actually getting what you want, or think are supposed to want. As Hepburn shows here, it leads to a lot of running in place, whose main function is to create the illusion of activity so you can be able to tell yourself (and the people around you) that you are attempting to change things, while otherwise making sure that everything stays exactly the same. Summertime is ruthless in dissecting Jane's actions, while presenting itself as a gently pleasant romantic comedy-drama/Venice travelogue. It's a masterpiece

The film apparently helped tourism to Venice skyrocket, which makes sense as it presents the city in the most beautiful way possible, in a way that gives viewers the impression that they are slowly discovering its greatness. When Lean gets to a piazza, building, or side street, he often takes a bit of time, to reveal the true breadth of its beauty. Most of the time this happens through some quite elegant camera moves, but especially striking is the opening scene, which lets Venice showcase itself gradually through the window of a train moving towards it. As a result, Venice feels even more magical than Jane ever thought it would be, with Piazza San Marco as an especially romantic highlight. It turns out that you can actually just sit there and wait for a potential love interest to make eye contact and fall for you. In a way the film works as the inverse of the most famous scene in 500 Days of Summer. Yeah, it can be sad when reality turns out worse than your expectations, but there is far more potential for tragic blundering when reality actually exceeds your expectations. No better example of that than the ending of this film.