500 Days of Summer has all the ingredients of a successful romantic comedy: charming lead stars, romantic setting and a great soundtrack. Only it isn't. As a matter of fact, it's everything but. There is no happily ever after, no grand proclamation of love and no earth-shattering kiss towards the end. This movie is about the disintegration of a relationship (or non-relationship). Sometimes it's happy, but mostly it's sad. There's pain, anger and bitterness. It's the kind of movie that should make you leave the cinema emotionally drained and depressed. Only it doesn't. It makes you look at love a little differently, yes. But oddly enough, it doesn't make you want to fall in love any less.
While 500 Days of Summer is not a love story, it is a story about love. What I really like about the movie is that it presents love in its totality. It goes beyond the fairy-tale endings, the sappy cliches and the romanticized presentation of love. It deals with everything else Pretty Woman and Notting Hill left out:
People fall in love. People fall out of love. And sometimes people never fall in love at all.
Sometimes you fall in love with the wrong person. Sometime life gets in the way.
Not every relationship lasts.
Harsh? Yes. But it's a dose of reality that we all have to learn. Let's admit it. At one point, we were all like Tom (Some of us still are.) We had this grand but misconstrued notion of love. We had it all panned out in our heads, our versions of finding the one and how everything would just fall into place. While it's very romantic, it's also very unreal. The truth is love can be tough. Love is a constant work. Love hurts. I think it is only when we acknowledge these facts and accept them that we can be truly in love. After all, love is not just about the good. It comes with the bad and the weird.
500 Days of Summer also taught us another important lesson about love: love for oneself. There is more to life than constantly searching for the one. Love is not about finding the right person to complete us. Love means finding yourself and being complete on your own. Love doesn't always have to involve another person. Sometimes YOU is enough.
Lastly, 500 Days of Summer tells us that there is life after love has gone. Be it finding our Autumn or being content with being alone for the moment, we will move on. We will go back to our feet. We will look at the world differently. We will be happy again.
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