On Criterion, I watched Summertime, a 1955 romantic comedy-drama, directed by David Lean and co-written by Lean and H.E. Bates, based on the play The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents. The film stars Katharine Hepburn as Jane, a middle-aged "spinster" secretary from Akron, Ohio, who takes a trip to Venice, Italy, after having saved for it for many years. She's amazed by the gorgeous sights of the city, and staying in a home run by a glamourous widow, Signora Fiorini (Isa Miranda) who rents out the rooms as a pensione. She meets other American tourists, both are pairs of couples, and she feels lonely when surrounded by couples in Venice, wanting her own romance and not to feel so alone. Throughout her trip, she is often pestered by a barefoot Italian street kid, Mauro (Gaetano Autiero), who hustles her for money in exchange for small trinkets and helping her find her way around Venice. Mauro yells like he's a middle-aged Italian man in a little boy's body.
Jane often wanders around Venice, filming the sights with her mini-camera, taking pictures, and wearing fitted light dresses. On her trip, she meets Renato (Rossano Brazzi), an Italian antiques dealer who had noticed her sitting alone in the Piazza San Marco, and they spark up a romance, while Jane knows that this will be fleeting and end when she returns home.
I really enjoyed this film a lot. I had heard of it before, but confused the plot with Hepburn's 1957 film Desk Set, thinking she was playing a librarian visiting Venice in Summertime, instead of playing a librarian in Desk Set. There's some wonderful quiet scenes when the camera just lingers on Jane as she walks around in a quiet place by herself, like hanging around after her new friends have left, and just sitting in her solitude and embracing the quiet, and Katharine Hepburn does some devastatingly good physical acting in those moments. The film really feels like a solo emotional journey for a female character, and I could see it inspiring more contemporary films like Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), with the depiction of Diane Lane's character as a new resident in Tuscany and finding fleeting romance and making friends with charming locals.
I wasn't as into the romance part of the film with Jane and Renato, mostly seeing Renato as taking advantage of her as an American tourist and trying to give her a fantasy of a romance with an Italian man rather than something more real. I much preferred the scenes with Jane and Signora Fiorini, where I felt they had more warm chemistry with each other, and while a 1950s mainstream film was not going to outright depict a lesbian relationship, I felt there was more interesting potential in that unexplored story than with a man who seemed to be putting on airs to impress Jane.
One of my favorite lines in the film was in the finale, when Jane's trip is coming to an end and she's sad that her romance with Renato has reached its conclusion. She says how when she was younger, she would stay at parties too long because she didn't know when to go, but now with him, and being grown up, she knows when to leave. It was very mature and poignant and showed a lot of her character's growth throughout the film and her journey.
This was a really lovely and interesting movie, and I've found lately that I've watched more David Lean films, but not his major epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago, but more his smaller character-driven films like Brief Encounter, Hobson's Choice, and Summertime. They've been interesting to watch, and I'm happy I checked this one out.
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