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The Criterion Channel Presents: Summertime (1955)


The trajectory of David Lean’s career as a filmmaker is probably defined by 1955’s Summertime, a movie that is both his first international production and by some account his personal favourite. It rather finely bridges the line between the British dramas and Dickens adaptations that he had made to great acclaim in the U.K. and the stately foreign-set epics that would bring him greater attention and technical praise through to the end of his career. Summertime was his first movie filmed on location abroad in a picturesque environment -Venice to be exact. Reportedly, he fell in love with the city, and it’s not hard to see the connection between this experience and his subsequent career shift. The very next movie he would make after it would be The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Summertime came to the collection quite recently, and is his only movie after the 1940s currently afforded a place there (though I assume the absence of his epics is because of their own distribution companies). It’s a rather curious movie, produced through the U.S., U.K., and Italy, that sends Katharine Hepburn, its’ only star of name recognition, to Venice for an autumn years love story. She plays a secretary from Akron, Ohio (in spite of her classic transatlantic accent) who has longed to visit Venice and saved up for it for years. Jane Hudson is polite, charming, and very enthusiastic about her dream city, but is also terribly lonely and transparently sad as she sits in a cafe by herself or takes in the tourist attractions solo. She makes a few friends of course, other Americans staying at the same pensione as her, but they are in pairs and she feels a touch awkward in their company. She retreats at learning she would be an imposition on their sightseeing tour to Murano after she asks to join -later at risk of being spotted by them in a cafe (indeed in the hopes she would be), she arranges the second chair at her table and her refreshments to look as though someone were seated there with her -but they don’t notice her. It’s some of the tenderest acting I’ve seen from Hepburn, who hadn’t often played women like this, so quietly lonesome and desperate. And in fact the movie itself paints a pretty authentic portrait of travelling by oneself.
I don’t use that metaphor whimsically, this is in fact a very visually charming movie. It was only Lean’s second in technicolour, first in over a decade, and it looks so rich and lovely, the jovial spectrum reflecting its’ ornate setting. The film does effectively act as tourism propaganda for Venice, but then that’s not terribly hard to do for the place often touted the most beautiful city in the world. All of the awe the movie has for it works too in relation to Jane’s frame of mind -she is so enamoured with it, grinning at everything she sees and taking pictures on that old box camera of hers. The atmosphere is so potently related in a way it had no chance of being had the film shot in studio. And obviously of course it is ripe for a romance.
Jane meets Renato de Rossi (Rossano Brazzi) in an antiques shop where he flirts with her and sells her a red goblet from the 18th century, teaching her of the bargaining method to sales transactions that is apparently the norm in Italy. They both make independent efforts to see each other again, and each time they meet the love affair becomes more overt. And it’s interesting the way that the film depicts Jane’s repression, her hesitations to pursue things with Renato, while he plays to her curiosity as persuasion. On the one hand it is manipulative, but on the other he has a point and Jane could clearly use a little boldness in her life, a little spontaneous pleasure. They do have sex eventually, something which was incredibly controversial with the American censors -especially given Renato was earlier revealed to be legally married (though separated). These little complexities that have Jane in conflict, second-guessing herself, is what makes the romance really fresh and interesting -not to mention the fact that it’s between two middle-aged people.
The bottom line is that Jane needs this Venice swing, she needs to fall in love and have a whirlwind affair in a gorgeous city. Renato basically speaks for the audience when he suggests as much. And in its’ last scenes before she leaves for home, it has that soulful elegance of something like Before Sunrise -Lean knowing how to shoot the city and the characters in relation to it so romantically. Which shouldn’t be a surprise, it’s not his first great movie about a fleeting love affair.

Criterion Recommendation: Terms of Endearment (1983)
I watched Terms of Endearment again recently and while it will always be a second place James L. Brooks film to Broadcast News in my mind, I was still overcome by how thoroughly I enjoyed it. Like Brooks’ other films, it walks a line of sincerity and cynicism well as it tells a heartfelt story of a mother and daughter over a period of about fifteen years, the ups and downs in their love and family lives, and their own nuanced relationship with each other. Shirley MacLaine won the Oscar for it, and she is the biggest acting highlight, but Jack Nicholson (who also won an Oscar) was really striking as well in a more humanistic performance than I’m used to seeing from him. Also Jeff Daniels is a great doofus of a husband. The interplay between MacLaine and Debra Winger is so ingratiating, there’s just an honesty that comes across through Brooks’ script that makes it, for lack of a better word, endearing. Michael Gore’s score is beautiful, the ending is of course as heartbreaking as ever, it’s just an all around wonderful family drama of a type that once really mattered in Hollywood. Criterion has Broadcast News in its’ collection, I think it’s fair that Terms of Endearment be there too.

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