(500) Days of Summer

There are many--too many--movies about people finding their soul mates, about how they fall in love in the first instant they met, and how they get through a bunch of fun troubles to finally get together and live happily ever after. Luckily (500) Days of Summer is not one of those movies.
Tom and Summer are not soul mates, they are not destined to be together, and they won’t, despites Tom’s efforts. He is a hopeless romantic that believes in the romantic ideas he writes in greeting cards. He wants to fall in love and the new girl in the office, Summer, has everything to fall in love with her.
Summer is intelligent, beautiful, funny, nice and many other qualities that captivate Tom. A coincidence in music tastes is enough for him to believe she could be his soul mate, and a kiss next to the copy machine ratifies it. But before we start sharing Tom’s opinion the movie remembers us that it won’t finish with them together happy forever.
After the promising start on the firsts days we jump to the last days when Tom is cracked by the finish of the relationship (what remembers me Jim Carrey in the credits sequence of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). And we will continue the ride across those 500 days jumping from the exciting beginning to the nostalgic later days to the happy but ephemeral middle. This fragmented not chronological order makes us see these 500 days as a whole.
The moments we witness are small and could look ordinary, but first of all they are honest, like the kind of events you remember when recall a relationship, and as a part of the whole they become meaningful.
But that fragmented chronology is not the only formal cinematography recourse that enrich the movie, actually it is full of recourses that maybe are only possible thanks to the background in video clips the director have. He builds with freedom the movie, using so different things that goes form a Disney’s like musical to reinterpretations to Bergman’s most famous scenes, passing by a wonderful use of split screen, that shows the difference between reality and expectation.
And maybe that is the main issue in the movie, that difference, the expectation created by Tom about Summer, and the painful acceptance of the fact that sometimes love is not as we want. And that’s something we all has passed trough.