Katherine Hepburn in SUMMERTIME lacked the vocabulary of dating apps but faced the same obstacles to finding love
Warning: This story contains spoilers for a film that was released 68 years ago.
The way we talk about relationships has changed in the advent of online dating even though navigating the pitfalls of intimacy has not become any easier with the improved vernacular.
The New York Times published a story this week that explained dating terms for modern singles who might be new to the apps.
Whether the apps have improved the odds of curing loneliness, or are exacerbating the difficulty exponentially in ways we do not yet understand, we cannot say. It is too soon to tell.
Even without smartphones and dating platforms, SUMMERTIME (1955) reminds us that a dating ‘profile’ obscures, and outright omits, significant details about the person buying you flowers.
Director David Lean’s film — adapted from the play The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents — tells the midlife story of Jane Hudson (Katherine Hepburn) who is single by choice and taking her dream trip to Venice. A chance encounter with a well-coiffed Italian creates sparks and some awkward complications when she discovers he is married.
The film, available now on the Criterion App, was banned in India in 1955. Lean claimed the Indian film censors objected to the depiction of an American spinster falling in love with a married Italian man, despite the fact that the character divulges to the audience that he is separated from his wife.
Wink. Wink. Sure he is.
The film received several cuts in Germany, though what was excised from the original version is not known.
Hepburn, who was 47 at the time, received her sixth Oscar nomination for the performance (Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress 12 times and won four) and the film endures to this day on the strength of her textured independent streak even as it recedes under the assault of Italian charm — on multiple fronts.
I thought it would be interesting to review SUMMERTIME through the lens of modern dating to illustrate how little has changed in the past 70 years. Don’t worry if you couldn’t get behind the NYT paywall to learn the terminology as I’ve included hyperlinks to explain them.
Jane Hudson receives little backstory but the audience can infer from her repressed state that she has little experience in the arenas of the heart having sacrificed relationships on the alter of her career.
When we meet Jane she exudes a practiced air of dispassion.
That said, Hepburn instills in Jane the possibility of a spark. Love, though foreign to Jane, intrigues her intellectually.
As a concept, love requires certain environmental conditions for Jane to confirm her theories, and she has saved for years working as a self-described “fancy secretary” to conduct her experiment.
She brings a camera to capture the city in tidy little frames but seems disinterested in even soft launching a connection with Mauro, a cherubic street urchin who volunteers to show her the city. Jane politely asks Mauro to stay out of her viewfinder.
I don’t doubt her skills as a photographer but found myself wondering who would she ever share the photos with?
She wastes no energy cobwebbing any expired romance in the rear-view mirror, and the film seems to suggest that no suitors have called on her in decades.
Once in Venice she meets a pair of fellow Americans also on a vacation who, upon first glance, remind Jane (and the audience) how lonely it must feel to be unfettered in the presence of romance. Summertime in Venice is unmistakably the cuffing season.
On her first evening in Venice, Jane walks to the Piazza San Marco, where the sight of ubiquitous couples expounds her own sense of loneliness. While seated at an outdoor cafe, she becomes aware of a lone Italian watching her; panicking, she quickly leaves.
The male gaze is too unsettling. The possible outcomes of such an interaction seem to overwhelm her; repudiate her moxie; defeat her.
Lamenting that the screenwriters had not written another Italian character to compete for Jane’s affection, I am reminded of the infinite possibilities that modern dating allows us. Though access to more potential romantic partners in volume alone through technology has not made satisfaction any easier to find. Some would argue that is has added to the obstacles of dating.
SUMMERTIME has room to occupy us with at least one more theoretical love interest. Even the small bit of breadcrumbing between her and Signora Fiorini, the widow who runs the hotel, feels unintentional and polite by modern standards; a fan fictional shipping.
Maybe it is just my modern sensibility that pushed back against Hepburn going all weak in the knees for the first paisano to make a pass, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The following day, Jane goes antiquing and sees a red goblet in the window. Upon entering the shop, she discovers that the owner, Renato de Rossi (Italian actor Rossano Brazzi), is the man whose leering flustered her before.
Their first conversation is not exactly boilerplate meet-cute as he attempts to apply the rizz and she tries to stifle the urge to beat a hasty retreat.
Eventually, Jane succumbs to the intense eye contact of Renato, whose grasp of the English language is just up to the task of pouring honey into the ear of whoever guards the fortress she has built around her heart.
This isn’t Rapunzel letting down her hair as much as it is Shirley Valentine loosening her inhibitions under the application of ouzo and the siren song of the cicadas in the heat of the Mediterranean sun.
Suggestive lines like, “You are like a hungry child who is given ravioli to eat. ‘No’ you say, ‘I want beefsteak!’ My dear girl, you are hungry. Eat the ravioli.” sound less offensive in an Italian accent. Romantic even.
Or is Renato masterfully manipulating the canals of Venice; the street musicians; the Campari macchiato into gaslighting the temperate secretary from Ohio into more horizontal Olympics?
Even in 1955, we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop. June eventually discovers that he is married and has several children but what other lies or omissions has he got tucked up his tailored sleeves?
When he sends his clerk to apologize for his tardiness on a date we have to wonder if Renato is cookie-jarring her?
Are his red flags enough to dismiss him entirely? And are his beige flags simply the byproduct of the language barrier?
Is love quantifiable and real, or is her tryst the tragic misunderstanding of a situationship?
And what are we to make of the origins of Jane’s emotional release? Hepburn’s performance, though groundbreaking in 1955, leaves much to the audience’s interpretation.
Is she a spellbound victim to the city of Venice or experiencing a profound personal awakening? Making Venice the driving force in propelling the film is a challenge met masterfully by Lean. SUMMERTIME endures as a time capsule that evokes heartache simply as evidence of a time when humanity possessed style.
Men wear tailored suits in the summer heat while women bare no skin above the knees in skirts and dresses that belie a modesty imposed upon the production by the cooperation of the local Catholic officials. I said it was stylish, not comfortable.
The Italians initially resisted Lean’s request to film on location during the summer months, the height of the tourist season, especially when local gondolieri — fearful they would lose income — threatened to strike.
Eventually, when United Artists’ ample donation to finance the restoration of Saint Mark’s Basilica were made, government officials issued the permits — as long as Lean promised that no short dresses or bare arms would be seen in, or near, the city’s holy sites!
Besides, old world religiosity and American temperance are two more obstacles standing between Jane and happiness.
Jane forgot the first two stages of international reinvention. Sure, she finds Love, but she forgot to Eat and Pray.
The film comes to a rational conclusion as Jane chooses to decamp from Italy — and from Renato — as if to go any further would prove irrevocably painful to her soul.
She tells little Mauro at the train station that she will see him again when she comes back, but Hepburn delivers the line as a kindness; we know that she is never coming back.
Audiences can debate the outcome of her decision, but at the least it is exactly that: Her decision. Remember women’s agency was not a Hollywood priority in 1955.
The fairy tale is excised for what it is, and placed upon the shelf for memory. Jane handles the situation like an adult and informs Renato of her intentions when she could easily have ghosted him.
