500 days of selfishness

After drooling over the film’s trailers for the months it was in the theater, my wife and I finally rented 500 Days of Summer with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Based on the film’s popularity and the tidbits publicized about the plotline, I wouldn’t be giving anything away by spoiling that it’s about the guy losing the girl and not getting her back. I will, however, give other things away, so if you’ve stumbled onto this page via Google and haven’t seen the film, go ahead and stop reading.

The film presents itself with an undertone of conflict as to the nature of fate. The female love interest, Summer, doesn’t believe love exists or that she has found or will ever experience love while the male protagonist, Tom, believes that the idea of a soulmate is not only possible but can be laced with destiny.

In keeping with the aforementioned storyline, Summer decides after getting closer to Tom than she has anyone else before him, she does not want to be with Tom anymore. After his depressed weeks of emotional churning over the loss of what he believed was his “one true love”, Tom runs into Summer in a train car on the way to a mutual friend’s wedding.

Summer is visibly warm to the poor guy during the wedding reception, dropping inside jokes from their relationship, dancing with him to Etta James’ “At Last”, the most romantic of songs. Toward the end of the night she invites him to a party at her place, to which he shows up to find her sporting a large engagement ring.

Further depressed weeks of emotional churning find Summer successfully married when she shows up to Tom’s favorite spot in the city and backhandedly gives him “closure” on their relationship. He explains that having been burned, he no longer believes in fate or love. She explains that she now believes in fate and love, just not with him.

While the switch in positions was foreseeable when it became evident that Tom was not going to ever win back the object of his undying affection, the film in hindsight was less about the overt struggle over the idea of fate and love through apparent love and loss, and more about the underlying exercise in exploring the unbridled depths of a girl’s selfishness.

At the height of his inner turmoil, Tom has a conversation with his younger sister Rachel, during which she puts the idea in his mind that perhaps Summer wasn’t really “the one”. This is news to both Tom and the film’s viewers, as Summer in some respects has been so far portrayed without flaw.

Tom begins a memory montage of the previous months, taking the viewer through each previously lived-through scenario from a different perspective, one filled with warning signs and perhaps more reality-based than his prior fantasy-laden rollercoaster ride. To Tom, the memories are laced with indicators that she may not have liked him as much as he believes she had, that maybe it wasn’t the fated love he believed it to be. To the viewer, the memories are laced with signs that Summer has been as toxic as a waste dump. She is what gentlemen refer to as a “tar baby”, once the surface is penetrated, there is no chance of ever being extracted from complete, hopeless submission.

Tom’s interactions with Summer began innocently, he initiated light conversation right up until the point that a friend let it slip to her that Tom liked her. From that point on, she initiated all interactions and escalations. She kissed him unprompted in the copy room, she undressed in his bed, she pulled him into the Adult section of the video store, she told him her deepest darkest secrets. When he angered at her seeming lack of outspoken commitment, she showed up at his apartment in the middle of a rainy night. She expressed every action indicative of physical and emotional intimacy, all the while refusing to outwardly admit she was even dating him. She drove the proverbial bus, and took Tom for a ride.

She also initiated the breakup of this mind game of a relationship, going her own way free to find someone else to pretend not to date. When Tom ran into her at the aforementioned wedding, she couldn’t help herself but to see if there is still any fertile soil in which to plant, stringing him along emotionally for an evening while she not only had no intention of making her actions amount to anything, but was also about to get engaged to someone else.

Her visit to Tom’s favorite spot in the city, during which she bestowed on him the “I now believe in fate, just not with you” conversation, ended up in even more manipulation, as she placed her hand on his for a long, dramatic moment before she got up to leave. Even as a married woman, she couldn’t resist riding him around one last time. It was ultimately the height of both selfishness and inappropriateness. Tom clued in to this a bit, he made a passing comment during the conversation that she “gets to do whatever she wants.”

By the end of the film, Tom begins the first of an open-ended number of days with his new love interest Autumn, with whom he strikes up a conversation waiting for a job interview to begin, and who coincidentally shares the same love for Tom’s favorite spot in the city. The audience can presumably stand up and cheer due to Tom’s renewed belief in fate, and the credits can roll as the film has upheld the existence of the classic religion of America, the Church of Romantic Love. This viewer stood up and cheered for a different reason. I suspect Tom didn’t even realize how lucky he was to rid himself of the sick and twisted Summer and her selfish, manipulative grasp.

Though it has been days since I’ve watched this film, I can still taste my disdain for the Summer character in the back of my mouth. It would normally appear that I didn’t care for the film and its unpleasant storyline. On the contrary, I felt this film was fantastic. The writers, directors, and cast succeeded in the most important aspect of film making: they created a character that they developed enough to cause me to have an exceedingly strong emotion toward that character. To create a piece of art that evokes emotion at all is, to me, a success, and this film’s storyline and characters will be memorable for some time to come.

deepa mehta – water

Last night E and I saw Water, the third installment in a trilogy of somewhat controversial films directed by Deepa Mehta. Outlining the circumstances faced by widows in Hindu culture, the film is set in India the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time period frought with growing backlash against long-standing tradition and culminating in the revolution against Britain and the arrival of Mahatma Ghandi.

In Indian culture, widows are apparently believed to become half dead themselves on the death of their husband, with whom they become unified through marriage, and are left with options limited to burning themselves in the funeral pyre or taking a vow of self-denial. Those choosing the latter are often thrust into ashrams, isolated with other cast-off widows, and sold into prostitution. Remarriage is considered sinful, the remainder of life is lived on the bottom of the socio-religious food chain. The film opens with a quote from the Laws of Manu, one of the Hindu sacred texts, relating that women unfaithful during marriage or the widowed period are promised their rebirth in the womb of a jackal.

Though this attitude has begun to change in the larger Indian cities, these conditions are evidently still rampant, especially in rural villages. While this is one of the many other-cultural norms that we in America see as being odd at best and deplorable at worst, it struck me while I was watching that parallels can be drawn between this situation and Americans using oddball antiquated Biblical scripture to justify bigotry toward homosexuality, or the parallels between the violence perpetuated by fringe fundamentalist Islam and the abortion clinics bombed domestically in the name of God.

I did some reading on the director and the firestorms surrounding her releases, filming for Water actually began in 2000 but was halted due to extreme opposition from Hindu fundamentalists, and only secretly resumed in Sri Lanka this past year. During the opening of Fire, which tells the story of two Hindu women who fall in love with each other, the theater screening the film was burned to the ground.

Definitely one of the better films I’ve seen in months, I just added Earth and Fire to my Netflix queue. Regardless of the grounds on which people stir the pot, I’ve always been drawn to the ones that do the stirring.