(500) Days Of Summer is a romantic comedy distinguished by quirky casting, genre-defying cultural references and a deft gender reversal (so here it's the man – or rather manchild – who burbles madly about meeting ‘The One’ and generally acts like a relationship-seeking missile). Unfortunately, it’s not as good as I’ve just made it sound. It is, however, a film that’s pretty much composed of self-conscious soundbites (or whatever you call their cinematic equivalent), so here’s a few more to sum it up:
A rom-com for the iPod generation.
A 90-minute Vodafone commercial.
An emotional mixtape charting the highs and lows of indie-love.
A Brief Encounter for the MySpace/facebook/whatever age.
Personally, I groaned at its clumsy, borderline-sacrilegious references to The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Belle & Sebastian. It actually feels like a generic rom-con dressed in vintage by a purposefully edgy stylist who then shoe-horned some cool music into it while laughing like a maniac. That said, I thought Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s drunken karaoke version of The Pixies’ ‘Here Comes Your Man’ was better than the original...
Ultimately, the film is an enjoyable, fairly okay piece of work, but it does feel like something constructed by a committee briefed to take the indie-by-numbers formula and clamp it to a rom-com. No surprises, then, that it comes from Fox Searchlight, who previously gave us Juno. Zooey Deschanel is perfectly cast as the titular Summer – a kind of anti-ingenue – but the otherwise likeable Gordon-Levitt just seems too much of a junior yuppie to be truly convincing as alleged indie-boy Tom. The fact that he never goes to any gigs is a little suspicious, but when he ends up hitting on an orange-hued Jessica Alba-type (not-so-hilariously named Autumn) I wanted to shout 'Imposter!'...
(500) Days Of Summer is released in the UK on 4 September 2009
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