Ever since first
seeing it over 20 years ago, Summertime has
progressively risen in my esteem to become not only my favorite David Lean film
but one of my favorite films by anyone. It’s an anomaly, resting alone between
Lean’s period of modest British dramas, nearly all black-and-white, and the
period that made him an institution; of globe-trotting, widescreen color epics
starting with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).
Lean got so respectable that it became fashionable to despise him just for
being so. But we’re forgetting the
reason why he succeeded in the first place, and it wasn’t because he did things
the easy way or pandered to audiences.
(Who would guess that a 3-1/2 hour drama set in the desert and devoid of
women or romance would be the popular masterpiece that it was? Lawrence
of Arabia, by the way.) Lean was one
of a handful of devout practitioners of what was sometimes called “pure cinema”
along with his equally rigorous fellow Brits Powell, Hitchcock and Reed, which
descended from Russian montage work and evolved into a style based on the
point-of-view as a means of synchronizing the audience’s emotions with the
characters in the film. Katharine
Hepburn plays awkward American spinster Jane Hudson traveling alone through Europe , in search of the meaningful life
experiences that have eluded her thus far.
In breathtakingly picturesque Venice , she rents a hotel room with a spectacular
view of the city and proceeds attempting to make friends and soaking in the
local color. She meets antique merchant
Renato de Rossi (Rosanno Brazzi) in a piazza and a tentative romance begins. Paradoxically, the plot is old-fashioned and
quaint, but the style is strikingly modern and undated, as are most of Lean’s
films. The second the opening credits
end, a startling jump cut shows us one of Lean’s beloved locomotives barreling
into Venice .
Rarely before was shooting on location as vital to a film, and Lean
makes the most of every canal, alley and balcony. We can feel Lean’s new addiction to travel,
shared by Hepburn’s character; something that will be controversial in his
native England by some who called Lean “anti-British” or at least not a proud Englishman. His more famous films critique imperialism
and cultural conceits fairly openly; in
Summertime these issues are just as present. Jane is highly conscious of the “ugly
American” syndrome in her fellow tourists, and in herself. She makes an effort to speak phrase-book
Italian but does so in a comically loud way that only further embarrasses
her. Her struggle to lower her guard and
skepticism about people, and to accept Renato’s affection, is the emotional
crux of the film. There are moments of poignancy
handled so subtly and sensitively by Lean that they put modern tear-jerkers to
shame. Even a little moment such Jane
first sensing Renato’s eyes upon her is filled with a huge range of emotions,
from humor to despondency, achieved cinematically rather than by writing and
acting. It’s all based on Lean’s
selection of shots, which always follow the characters’ trains of thought. For Lean and the other purists, POV doesn’t
necessarily mean seeing what the characters physically see but seeing what they
are thinking about. Lean even manages to
throw in some Eisensteinian cross-cutting in the scene of Jane and Renato
consummating their romance, alternating between their kissing and fireworks
going off nearby; (interestingly, Hitchcock did this exact thing almost
simultaneously in To Catch a Thief released
the same year). I don’t consider Lean a
great director because he made sweeping epics so well; I consider him great
because he religiously applied cinematic principles that he believed in – in
every film from In Which We Serve (1942)
to A Passage to India (1984); which
allowed him to communicate with his audience on an instinctive level by using
his shots and cutting to make them feel the way he did about a situation.
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