Venice has perhaps never looked better on film than it does in David Lean’s Summertime. The city’s Technicolor-enhanced beauty reflects the perspective of Jane Hudson (Katherine Hepburn), an unwed secretary from Ohio who’s saved for years to go on this trip of her dreams. Based on Arthur Larents’s play The Time of the Cuckoo, the 1955 film also has literary ties to Henry James, with whom it shares an interest in the idea of citizens of a young, nominally liberty-minded nation traveling to the Old World of Europe and having the full range of their repressed conservatism revealed to them in the face of more libertine customs.
Jane is introduced with all of Hepburn’s trademark comic energy—a knife-edge balance of total control and hopeless clumsiness—but her buoyancy soon turns solemn as the lovers strolling the streets around the woman forces her to confront the agony of her loneliness. Some of these lovers are as much comic relief as a source of jealousy. An elderly American couple (Jane Rose and MacDonald Parke) are presented as good-natured bumpkins who seem surprised by the very existence of Italy, butchering even the simplest of Italian phrases. But Jane nonetheless delights in their rapport and their goofy reflection of her own enthusiasm. Still, the totality of lovers, young and old alike, canoodling all around her wears on the spinster until she finds herself drawn to a local man, Renato (Rossano Brazzi), whose respectful but swift wooing of her comes to disarm her completely.
Just as Jane starts to give herself over to the possibility of romance well past the point in her life that she ever expected to experience it, the other shoe drops: that Renato is married with several children, and not even the fact that he’s separated from his wife can mitigate the blow to the repressed and conservative Jane’s sense of decency. Her disgusted reaction, though, feels like it belatedly and mercifully quells the jealousy that she’s felt the entire time toward the throngs of lovers who surround her as if in silent mockery of her singlehood.
Renato’s lie of omission would seem to set up a major conflict in the final act, except Jane accepts his excuse of espousing libertine Italian values with little pushback, ostensibly robbing the last half-hour of outward tension. But this premature resolution belies the true drama of Jane’s predicament. Having finally found a possible way out of a life of loneliness, she desperately clings to that chance at the expense of the value system that left her alone in the first place. The breezy charm of the final act is a perverted and claustrophobic inversion of the buoyant energy of the first half as Jane’s initial, genuine infatuation with Italy becomes a mask of calm that she struggles to maintain as the date of her return home nears.
Summertime might be seen as a classical response to Roberto Rossellini’s more modern films starring Ingrid Bergman, namely Stromboli and Journey to Italy. Lean similarly uses Italian backdrops, in this case Venice’s ornate Renaissance architecture, to articulate a woman’s crisis of sexual and existential awakening as she enters middle age. But where Rossellini the native Italian explored the lesser-seen areas of cities and countrysides, Lean basks in the splendor of Venice’s tourist hotspots in a manner that, as evinced by Summertime’s rapturous visual splendor, anticipates his subsequent string of massively scaled productions.
Image/Sound
Jack Hildyard’s sumptuous Technicolor cinematography looks resplendent on Criterion’s disc, which is sourced from a 4K restoration. Vibrant shots of Venice’s landmarks and waters glow radiantly, but arguably even more impressive is how the image handles the unpredictable fluctuations of natural light without any loss of clarity or resulting noise artifacts. The mono soundtrack is clear, quiet in dialogue scenes but ably capturing the bustle of the city.
Extras
A 1963 TV interview with David Lean offers profound insight into his life and career, from his childhood introduction to cinema to his early apprentice work in film and beyond. Lean lays out his professional life and his working methods with an undimmed enthusiasm for every aspect of the craft. A 1988 audio interview with Summertime cinematographer Jack Hildyard delves into his work with Lean. Film historian Melanie Williams contributes an extended discussion of Lean’s career, arguing for his excellence as an emotive, melodramatic filmmaker. Finally, a booklet essay by critic Stephanie Zacharek unpacks the film’s Portrait of loneliness.
Overall
David Lean’s gorgeous, aching romantic film Summertime receives a Blu-ray release worthy of its immaculate Technicolor splendor.
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