Summertime: Souvenirs

Loneliness and independence aren’t opposites but twins: Gemini states of being that can give even the shyest adventurers the courage to stride forth into the world. When a man refuses to be tied down, preferring freedom to all else, he’s an iconoclastic hero. But a woman without a partner, either by choice or by fate—or as the result of a choice she isn’t even conscious of having made—is often looked on with pity. If she’s younger, well-meaning friends reassure her that she still has time to find the right mate. If she’s older, it is assumed her ship has sailed, leaving her on some imagined shore of regret. For centuries, the term spinster—the very sound of the word conjuring grayness, the hollow ring of a lonely bell—was the easiest one to reach for in trying to describe a woman without a partner. And even today, the idea that a woman might cherish her freedom and at times feel incredibly lonely seems too complicated for many people to grasp.

Yet David Lean and Katharine Hepburn, paired as director and lead actor for Summertime (1955), capture this not-really-a-paradox in a cerebral pas de deux, as if each has found an unspoken understanding in the other. Their seemingly disparate sensibilities—Lean’s attention to craft and sense of decorum, Hepburn’s forthright crispness, which serves as a fortress for her eggshell fragility—merge in this incomparable odd-couple picture. Summertime is about how fear of living is more paralyzing than fear of death. Its ending should seem sad, yet it’s piercingly jubilant, like a celebratory cocktail with a complex, bittersweet finish. And the film is so rapturously beautiful to look at—shot by cinematographer Jack Hildyard on location in Venice, that most poetic and haunted of cities—that it seems more a song than a movie, a wordless expression of some ancient romantic longing. Yet with Hepburn at the center of his vision, Lean also teases out something surprisingly modern, not just for its time but for our time. Hepburn’s Jane Hudson—a self-described “fancy secretary” from Akron, Ohio, who has saved her money for a once-in-a-lifetime trip—is a woman who has done well for herself. But she can’t escape longing, because no one can. Longing for things is how we know we’re alive, though Summertime is less about longing than it is about that knowing. That’s what makes it extraordinary.

When we meet Jane, she’s making her way to Venice by train, later to board a water-bus to her hotel, loaded down with her suitcases and movie camera. This trip means everything to her; she wants to remember it forever, and she thinks the best way to do that is to capture it on film. But the camera will cause more problems than it solves. In one of the movie’s most famous scenes—though not necessarily its best one—Jane tumbles backward into a canal while trying to capture a picturesque storefront. (The anarchic street urchin who has insinuated himself as her guide to the city, played by Gaetano Autiero, grabs the camera just in time.)

Jane has reason to be flustered: the store belongs to a man she saw briefly on her first evening in the city, while having a drink in the Piazza San Marco. This suavely groomed middle-aged gent eyed her flirtatiously from the next table, igniting in her a confused flurry of indignation and desire, one that caused her to run off hastily. The following day, she serendipitously meets the man again, when a blown-glass goblet the color of candied cherries catches her eye in a shopwindow—it just happens to be his shop, and the two recognize each other instantly, though they pretend not to. She buys this lone goblet, even though she was hoping for a pair—he assures her that it’s a precious eighteenth-century antique, which it may or may not be. As he wraps it up for her, he suggests that he just may come across another to match it. If so, perhaps he might bring it by her hotel?

Any woman traveling alone—almost any woman, period—knows this kind of player when she sees him. But then, players are people too, and sometimes even they fall in love. This one, his carriage as elegant as his name, Renato, is played by Rossano Brazzi, and even if he is honest about his carnal desires, his soul is his most visible and alluring quality. He’s both a man and a metaphor for the mystery and adventure of travel itself.

Jane is ready for this man, whether she knows it or not. Because Summertime is also a movie about how we’re not quite ourselves when we travel—our molecules are vibrating at a higher frequency, making us more attuned, more porous. This is especially true in Venice, one of the most unsettling and beguiling cities on the planet. With its curving canals and confounding lacework of streets, not to mention its sudden and surprising dead ends, it’s both conspiratorial and haughty. It will defy you at every turn, literally, but if you’re the right kind of person, that will only make you love it more. A complicated woman needs a complicated city, and in Venice, Jane—and maybe Hepburn too—meets her match.

Lean, his biographer Kevin Brownlow tells us, was delighted to be making a movie there. He’d just come off the gratifying success of the gentle romantic comedy Hobson’s Choice, starring Charles Laughton, a box-office hit in Great Britain and the winner of the Golden Bear at the 1954 Berlin Film Festival. And far greater acclaim lay just a couple of years ahead, with the dazzling 1957 historical epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. Summertime connects these two very different films only chronologically; its intimacy and tenderness are distinctive within Lean’s career. He called Venice his favorite place in the world, and Summertime would become a favorite of his among his own films. “I’ve put more of myself in that film than in any other I’ve ever made,” he told a friend.

Both he and Hepburn needed a jolt at the time. Lean’s marriage to actor Ann Todd was disintegrating; he was eager to get away, and she stayed behind in London to play Lady Macbeth at the Old Vic. And although Hepburn’s life with Spencer Tracy—who remained married to his estranged wife, Louise, until his death in 1967—is often treated as a modern woman’s romantic fairy tale, a union of two equals that allowed her some independence, in truth it did require some compromise on her part. One of her biographers, William J. Mann, puts it bluntly: “For too long she’d been trying to nail the square peg of her personality into the round hole of life with Spencer.” In Venice, she had the company of two close friends of hers, the actor and acting coach Constance Collier and Collier’s secretary, Phyllis Wilbourn, who would later become Hepburn’s own loyal assistant. During this time, Mann writes, Hepburn “was starting to live once again.”

But there’s evidence, too, that she was lonely on the Summertime shoot. The intense heat made her miserable. And that famous swoop into the canal caused a staph infection in her eye, she said, that would plague her for the rest of her life. All these factors may contribute to the wistfulness of Hepburn’s Summertime performance—but then again, it’s just as reasonable to chalk it all up to acting. Her vulnerability in the film is sometimes expressed as a gruff mistrust of men and their sexual motives. But mostly, Hepburn expresses Jane’s yearning as a kind of homesickness for a romantic experience she has never had—as if the things she has read in books, or seen in paintings, or heard in music have instilled some ghost of a feeling as a place marker for the real thing. We see this in the way, her back to the camera, she calls down from her hotel terrace to a lone cat crossing a courtyard below. On the strange evening when she first notices Renato—her first night in a city that welcomes its visitors slowly and cautiously—she sits on the small steps leading down to one of the canals and notices the soft greenish gray of the water lapping at the half-submerged faces of a group of somber stone lions. Her mouth is turned down at the corners in a way that suggests displeasure with, and disappointment in, herself. Great unhappiness is possible even in a jewel box of a city.

As Renato pursues her, she resists—and resists. It’s bad enough, in her mind, that she might consider having coffee with a man she barely knows. Later, once she’s hooked on him, she learns he’s married, though he assures her that he and his wife are separated. None of this, in her mind, is proper. But in the end, she understands that blocking out the world is improper in itself. The scene showing how Jane prepares for her big evening date is one of the finest depictions of romantic expectation ever put to film: she indulges in a mani-pedi; she succumbs to the seduction of a perfect pair of red suede mules. Later, there will be fireworks, the literal kind in the sky and the figurative kind in the bedroom. Lean signals the latter by showing us one of those delicate red shoes being dropped discreetly to the floor of Renato’s balcony. Lean could be prim, but here he honors the idea that, to a woman, a shoe is never just a shoe. Sometimes the mere curve of a heel whispers a secret language only she can hear.

Jane’s triumph in Summertime isn’t a conquering of loneliness—some form of that will always be with her. Her victory is that she has said yes—not just to a man but to herself. Loneliness can’t be cured, but it can change shape. After Summertime was released, a Japanese fan magazine asked Lean what he’d hoped to say with the film. He responded with a series of notes that, Brownlow suggests, are more candid than you’d expect from a man who was rather reserved, perhaps because he didn’t imagine his comments would ever be read at home. “What appealed to me in the idea of Summertime? Loneliness,” he wrote. “It is a more common emotion than love, but we speak less about it. We are ashamed of it. We think perhaps that it shows a deficiency in ourselves. That if we were more attractive, more entertaining, and less ordinary we would not be lonely.”

And so, while it’s most convenient to think of Summertime as a movie about women’s loneliness, it reflects men’s too: we see that in Brazzi’s face, in the earnestness with which he assures Jane that he and his wife live separate lives, and in his anguished expression when Jane tells him she must go back to America. She urges him not to see her off at the train station, even though she not-so-secretly hopes he will appear: the cloud of missing him has already settled around her square, stalwart shoulders.

And sure enough, just as her train pulls away, she sees him running to catch up—is there anything more undignified than the sight of a man racing to catch up with love? He clutches a small box holding a gardenia—a replacement for a flower he bought for her earlier, one she accidentally dropped into a canal and he tried in vain to retrieve. He can’t get to her in time to give her the flower. She looks back at him as her train flies away; he grows smaller in the distance, holding his miniature white offering aloft.

Summertime is a romance between two people in search of an unnameable connection, and we warm to the way they find solace in each other. But the fleeting nature of this affair is its most golden element; it is romantic precisely because it can’t last. In the end, Summertime is really a romance of the self, a celebration of the person you can become when someone else touches you deeply. We’re all souvenirs of our own experiences, and what we take away from love affairs is sometimes of more value than what we gain when we try to wrest them into some ill-fitting frame of permanence. To leave at the right time is both the most painful thing you can do and the most freeing. A kept memento is a sad thing, but a memory remains alive and supple forever. It’s the flower you don’t catch, the one you never crush by pressing it into a book. It lives forever, as improbably permanent as a hushed city of secrets built on water, surviving one century after another against all odds.

Summertime: Souvenirs

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