Case Study Assessment
500 Days of Summer (2009)
If you judged this DVD by it’s cover, you’d think it’s yet another rom-com love story. Instead, as the narrator states “This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know upfront, this is not a love story.” Delving deeper into the structure of 500 Days of Summer, its a tragic romance filled with brief glimmers of hope and euphoria versus the fall of love and heartbreak. At an oversight, the film adheres to a stories typical three act structure, split into seven sequences. However, with the constant shift in tempo, and the non-linear techniques used throughout the film, the audience watch as we see this seemingly cliche romance fall away from Tom (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (played by Zoe Deschanel). We, the audience are moved backwards and forwards throughout the 500 days and from there can gather this is essentially non-linear.
Overseeing the narrative, the structure of it progresses in a linear fashion for the majority of the film, up until the flash-forwards begin. These dramatic glimpses of what life could be like for the two lovers leads up to the turning point in the relationship for Tom in the “Expectations vs Reality” scene that split-screen juxtaposes Tom’s expectations with the unfortunate reality of his own interpretation. This famous scene is brilliant in the sense it reveals what a typical love story would have played out like, which is the way Tom had hoped things would be like for he and Summer. In some ways, it takes that “happy ending” the audience and the the main character are hoping for, and shatters all the hopes for it occurring by showing the way that Summer appears emotionally distant from Tom when she is seen with another man.
From this point onwards, those flash-forwards that possessed so much hope, turn into flash-backs of the whirlwind romance Tom and Summer once shared. It is from this act onwards that we now see Tom wondering what went wrong. These flash-backs remind the audience of what the narrator warned us about – that “this is not a love story” and that our hopes for the two of them in the beginning of the movie, are now nothing but a distant memory. On the note of narration – the entire film is narrated in a “voice of god” style, to give this “romance” film that storybook, “better than reality” feel, almost as if this story was written with the idea that these two would eventually meet, and that their lives had been leading up to this meeting. However, the script of the narration is what differs it from telling just another happy tale. It is like the two are being watched over.
500 Days of Summer is an example of a narrative that totally disrupts our understanding of what a romance is. At the conclusion of the film, the audience is left feeling as though maybe this “romance” was never meant to be.
(Word Count: 504 Words)