“This Is Not A Love Story…”

I recently watched the movie, 500 Days Of Summer, and found it refreshingly different from the average romantic comedy, not least because the narrator starts off the movie by saying, “This is a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Tom Hansen, grew up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he met the one. The girl, Summer Finn, did not share this belief. You should know up front this is not a love story.”

This is an interesting statement, because what exactly constitutes a love story? If someone falls in love with a person who doesn’t return their feelings, could you say that this is a one-sided love story? Or is a love story defined only by the fact that it has a HEA (Happily Ever After), where both people fall in love? What about the couple who stay together for 10 years before divorcing… the end of their relationship is actually an UE (Unhappy Ending), so is this also “not a love story” as the love has faded and died? Or perhaps they never loved each other at all, but were simply infatuated with one another, which led to the UFE (Unhappy Fatuous Ending)?

Here is the synopsis of 500 Days of Summer from the official website:
http://www.500days.com/fox-searchlight-updates-500-days-of-summer-site.html
Boy meets girl
Boy falls in love
Girl doesn’t

When Tom, a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfriend Summer dumps him, he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days “together” to try to figure out where things went wrong. His reflections ultimately lead him to finally rediscover his true passions in life.

Directed by: Marc Webb
Written by: Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber
Cast: Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Clark Gregg, Minka Kelly, Matthew Gray Gubler, Rachel Boston, Geoffrey Arend, Chloe Moritz
Producers: Jessica Tuchinsky, Mary Waters, Steven Wolfe, Mason Novick

This post modern love story is never what we expect it to be - it’s thorny yet exhilarating, funny and sad, a twisted journey of highs and lows that doesn’t quite go where we think it will.

I highly recommend this film… it shows the loss of Tom’s innocence, the loss of his ideals and illusions, but how this doesn’t change his essential nature, or his ability to love. The loss of illusions is important in love, otherwise it is too easy to put the one you love on a pedestal, which they will inevitably topple off at some point in the future. Tom puts Summer on a pedestal, and refuses to believe what she repeatedly tells him. He wants to believe his version of their “love story”. Ironically, Summer, who is the unromantic protagonist in this story, uses her relationship with Tom as a stepping stone to love.

I don’t want to say too much about this movie, so I that I don’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but what I will say is that it turns the whole idea of a love story on its head, in that, in a number of ways, while watching 500 Days Of Summer, we keep expecting a miracle for Tom and Summer (even though the Narrator warns us at the beginning that it isn’t a love story), and that they WILL have their HEA. And ultimately they do reach a HEA - but in a totally unexpected way.

This movie highlights how every romantic relationship we have shapes us into the person we become, who may just be the right person for someone…

The lyrics of a song by Collin Raye called “All My Roads” sum it up:

Looking back from where I stand tonight
I wouldn’t change a thing about my life
Wrong turns I had to take back in those crazy years
Could not have been mistakes if they brought me here

‘Cause all my roads have led me to
This night, this love I share with you
And though the road was never smooth
Life has made me someone who
Could be the right someone for you

Read The Dashing Debutante, Lord Fenmore’s Wager and Send and Receive