(500) Days of Summer

Marc Webb’s film rests on an unreliable narrator, and the numbered day structure exists precisely for that: it lets you see the same relationship twice, in two different moods. The split screen that sets expectation beside reality is the thesis, and everything else is that idea repeated at other scales. The costume department worked to an explicit rule: only Summer is allowed to wear blue. The single exception is the musical number Tom dances through the morning after, where the extras turn blue as well, because at that moment his entire world is a reflection of her. On a second viewing that is the most concrete thing to watch for. The city is not an accident either. The story was first set in San Francisco and abandoned there on cost, then imagined in an unnamed American town, and finally fixed in downtown Los Angeles with the script rewritten around those buildings. To give the picture an older look, Webb ruled that no structure put up after 1950 could be used as a location. The furniture store passage was shot overnight while the shop was shut. Right for someone who treats distrusting the narrator as the game. Wrong for a viewer who needs the breakup assigned to one person’s fault.