Summertime
David Lean (1955)
David Lean said it was his favourite among all the films he directed. That’s immediately surprising because Summertime (released in Britain as Summer Madness) strikes one as an uncharacteristic Lean picture. Perhaps, though, it looks that way only in the context of the epics that comprised the last decades of his film-making life. Summertime is character-driven; the principal character is Jane Hudson, a middle-aged Ohio spinster on holiday in Venice, who falls in love with the city and with the some years younger Renato de Rossi, a local antique shop owner. Their affair doesn’t last beyond Jane’s holiday and Summertime has obvious similarities to Brief Encounter but the relative importance of the man, the woman and the locale is very different here: Venice is a stronger presence in the story than Renato and, in Lean’s hands, the place is kinetically alive. The camerawork is much more fluid than in later Lean movies and the city, as photographed by Jack Hildyard, genuinely is a place of many moods (refreshingly so, in comparison with powerfully monotonous 1970s films like Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now).
Summertime is travelogue cinema of a superior kind: Lean advertises Venice but its qualities are filtered through Jane Hudson’s shifting perceptions of her surroundings. From the moment she arrives, Jane is hard at work recording the sights on her cine-camera; once she’s emotionally involved with Renato, she stops taking pictures. Lean’s storytelling has a corresponding effect: as one becomes more absorbed by Jane’s story, the city turns into something more than its touristic highlights. (Lean, by the way, made Venice his second home after shooting this film.) Alone at her table in the crowded Piazza San Marco, Jane watches couples walking by: we see them both as documentary images and from Jane’s point of view. In a backstreet, the sound of her heels tapping on the pavement underlines her solitariness. The screenplay, by Lean and H E Bates, is adapted from Arthur Laurents’s 1952 Broadway hit The Time of the Cuckoo (written for Shirley Booth, who won a Tony for her performance). The primacy and vitality of Venice in Summertime make it a relatively rare example of successfully opening out a theatre piece.
The film ends with Jane Hudson’s departure from the city by train – this made me realise how much I preferred Summertime to Brief Encounter. This is largely because of the temperamental contrast between Katharine Hepburn’s Jane and Rossano Brazzi’s Renato. (Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, good as they both are in Brief Encounter, are understated in a similar stiff-upper-lip register.) There are probably too many shots of Jane looking lonely and forlorn – and this film anticipates the teary-eyed last phase of Hepburn’s screen career – but her idiosyncratic forthrightness ensures, from the start, that Jane is not a conventional shrinking violet. Back in Akron, Ohio, she is (in her own words) ‘a fancy secretary’. Hepburn is especially good at distinguishing Jane’s almost bossy confidence in superficial social intercourse from her uncertainty once any kind of intimacy with the opposite sex is threatened. Of course this distinction is in the script but Hepburn brings it brilliantly to life. In a recent piece in the New Yorker online, Richard Brody described the ‘essence of movie acting’ as ‘non-transformative, arising from the performer’s irresistibly fascinating presence, radiant being – what’s encapsulated as charisma’. I don’t entirely agree but Brody’s words are a good description of what makes Katharine Hepburn a great star and a great actress. David Lean introduces Rossano Brazzi very effectively: the camera first picks up Renato having a drink and reading his newspaper on the Piazza San Marco. He’s one man among many there until we see Renato notice Jane at the table in front of him – see that he’s amused and increasingly intrigued by her determined, flustered attempts to appear at ease. Brazzi’s reserve and slight woodenness as an actor increase his tentative charm; he plays off Hepburn very effectively.
Most of the supporting roles are pretty obviously written and played accordingly. Still, Jeremy Spenser looks and sounds (to my ears) convincingly Italian as Renato’s teenage son and it’s a pity Isa Miranda isn’t give a chance to do more with the character of Signora Florini, who runs the pensione where Jane is staying. Macdonald Parke and Jane Rose are entertaining enough as caricatures of enthusiastic, philistine Americans abroad; Darren McGavin as a promiscuous artist and Mari Aldon as his wife are dull. The latter has a conversation with Jane in a bar, in which they compare notes about being let down by their man – this is one of several scenes that seem to start too abruptly. Another is Renato’s arrival at the pensione to find Jane bedraggled after an accidental dousing in the canal. (Intent on lining up her next photograph, she walks over the edge and falls backwards into the water – to the entertainment of the crowd that gathers. A reprise of the incident, in which one of the locals demonstrates what Jane did and does it himself, is very funny.) The revelation that Renato is a father and a husband, although he’s separated from his wife, is irritating – less because it’s predictable than because it’s artificially delayed.
The street kid Mauro (Gaetano Autiero) was rather too ubiquitous for my liking (he also looks too clean) but his last appearance, on the station platform as Jane’s train is about to pull out, works well. It’s convincing that Jane tells Renato that she has to go home because their relationship will be spoiled if she stays. She begs him not to come to the railway station but, like us, has seen enough films in which lovers are reunited just before the train whistle blows still to hope that Renato will reappear. When she spots Mauro in the platform crowd, Jane is pleased to see him: when she and the child have said their goodbyes she remembers that she wanted to see someone else more. Renato materialises as the train is already moving. He is carrying a small parcel. He runs along the platform; it’s too late for him to hand the parcel to Jane but not too late for him to show her what it contains. He holds up – and, leaning out of the train, she sees – a single white gardenia. The moment rhymes, shamelessly but affectingly, with an earlier one in the film. A flower-seller comes to the table where Jane and Renato are sitting. Jane chooses a gardenia from among the blooms on offer. Later in the evening, she drops it accidentally in the waters of the canal and Renato tries, tantalisingly and unavailingly, to retrieve the flower.
1 March 2015