500 Days Of Summer (2009) - Nothing Wrong About Love.

★★★★☆

As the tagline goes, this is not a love story but a story about love. I think it is, but an unconventional one. You’d feel ambivalent towards this film that seems romantic but not quite; sounds funny but serious; poignant but hopeful. It’s a story that neither has a happy ending nor an unhappy one. The way it goes is also interesting enough. 500 days with Summer are shuffled and presented in disorder, but what’s amazing is that it’s not confusing at all.

Yeah, it’s about love. What is love then? Love’s certainly not anything you can buy and keep. It’s merely a delusional spark or an instinct feeling that’d carry you away and make you feel like the world’s so wonderful, or the complete opposite, just like Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) experiences in the film. Love’s unpredictable and elusive. It could appear this moment and be gone the next. Like Summer (Zooey Deschanel) says, you can never be sure about it. That’s why we’re all dosed by it. Truth is, love’s neither a good nor a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong about it. What seems problematic is our mind.

With Tom who believes in love, and Summer who doesn’t, ‘500 Days Of Summer’ wonders if there’s really anything meant to happen no matter what, or we do have a choice to make it happen or not. You know everything happens for a reason. It takes causes and conditions. Like a seed can’t grow into a tree without proper sunlight and water and stuff. Causes are something that you’ve done and can’t be changed. All you can do is to work on the conditions part so as to make things appear right away or so much, much later that it seems to go away (and die eventually). In that sense, you do have a choice. However, without causes, all your efforts will sure go down the drain. You can’t grow a tree without a seed, can you? That explains why sometimes love goes to waste however hard you try.

This film’s lovely, sweet and a lot of fun. There’s plenty of great music like this one by a British band called Mumm-ra that split up already after releasing only one album, sad. Enjoy then.