non-romance romance, #9: Summertime (1955, dir. David Lean)
eat the ravioli
I’ve opened up the paid subscription option for Restorative Romance and for now, Non-Romance Romance, the monthly series where I talk about art that is not typically classed as romances with romance as a framework, will be the paid content. Most of my stuff will continue to be free! My favorite stuff to write here are big projects (like the Dukes!) that look at many romance novels together—I never want to rush a project like that or skimp on the research.
But because of Substack’s monthly charge model, I wanted any paid content to be consistent. I have no shortage of takes that involve looking at something that is not a romance novel as if it were one (And if you’re ever dying to read a NRR take—email me and I forward you that newsletter, gratis!) Thank you for your support and for reading!! Dukes will return next week.
Summertime (1955, dir. David Lean) might be my hardest sell so far as a non-romance romance because I think in contemporary genre notions it is the closest to women’s fiction. And women’s fiction is often really closely aligned with romance, but an aggressive firewall between the two is very important to some readers and authors. When I call a Summertime a romance novel, with its central love story, but lack of “happy ending,” I get very near the line that separates “speaking metaphorically” and “just being wrong.”
But I’m going to try my best to explain what I mean.
kiss me hard before you go
In Summertime, Jane Hudson (played by Katharine Hepburn) is a secretary from Akron, Ohio. She has saved for years and now finally she is visiting the city of her dreams, Venice. She is on a tight budget. While other travelers she meets report their long itineraries or regale their bohemian lifestyles, she has come to Europe for one thing: Venice and all its romantic promise. She is not assuming that she will have a love affair though. Jane gets along with everyone, but thinks affairs of the heart are for young people. Romance is not For Her.
In the opening scene, pictured above, Jane hands a stranger a copy of a travel brochure titled “Venice: City of Romance” and films him on her super 8 camera. It’s very on the nose exposition that I’m weak for: Jane is a voyeur of both Italy and it’s romance. She is not in the storytelling frame of her own creation, but she is the director of the scenes we are about to see.
One night while eating alone in the piazza, she notices a man eating alone looking at her. He is the very handsome Renato di Rossi (played by very handsome Rossano Brazzi). Jane is overwhelmed by the threat or promise of his attention and scurries away. Later while antique shopping, she sees a ruby red glass goblet in the window of a shop and goes inside to purchase it. Renato is the shop owner and he tells her it is from the 18th century. He offers to be on the look out for a matching goblet so that she can have a pair. Between his hushed tones and held glances, and Lean’s tight close-ups, Renato’s interest in Jane is as clear as Jane’s anxiety about his interest.
Later while eating in the same piazza alone, Jane tips the chair across from her inward, as ot indicate to passerbys, including her pensione acquaintances, that she is not actually alone. But when Renato passes her and greets her, he receives the same message: that she is not available for connection and excuses himself. Jane, fearful of appearing to be alone, has doomed herself to loneliness for the evening.
The next day, Jane returns to Renato’s shop. He is not there, but she wants to get a shot of the exterior on her super 8. She’ll get a photo memory of their fleeting connection even if she can’t deliver an actual connection. While backing up, she falls into the canal, to great embarrassment. When Renato visits Jane’s pensione that night check on her after he hears of her accident (and to confess his attraction to her,) another pair of tourists interrupt them and show off their ruby red glass goblets. They bought a half dozen at a glass factory right after the goblets were made. Jane thinks Renato has played her for a fool, but when they are alone again, he convinces her that her goblet is an true antique and the new glasses are just based on traditional designs. The couple then attend a concert of music by Rossini in Piazza San Marco.
Venice, Rossini and Renato work their charms on Jane. During the concert, he offers to buy her a flower and she tells him of previous, youthful romance in Ohio where her date could not afford to buy a gardenia for her corsage. Renato purchases the gardenia for her. While walking through Venice, Jane accidentally drops the flower into a canal. Renato tries to retrieve it, but he cannot reach it. The gift has to stay in Venice, though Jane will take the memory with her.
That night, the couple kisses under a bridge. Though Jane is startled, they plan to see each other tomorrow evening. Jane spends the next day preparing for the date, indulging in new clothes and beauty treatments, and leaving her camera at home. She’s preparing to be looked at, moving from cameraman to object of gaze. She’s in the story now! But when Renato is late, he sends his shop boy to tell Jane of the delay. The teenager accidentally reveals that he is Renato’s son. In conversation with the boy, Jane realizes that Renato has four children and is married, though he and his wife are separated and live apart.
Jane returns to her pensione, distraught and Renato discovers her in this state. Jane asks about his obfuscation about his marriage and he says “I was afraid if you knew too soon, it would end us before we begin. Now, I'm afraid I was right.” She is furious at his betrayal, but Renato points out her hypocrisy of her love the romance of Italy, but her bourgeois disgust at the accompanying messiness that comes with the romance she loves to watch: “You come here and what you do? You ride in gondola, oh Venice, so beautiful, so romantic. Oh, these ltalians, so lyrical, so romantic. You dream of meeting someone you want. Young, rich, witty. And unmarried, of course. But me, I'm a shopkeeper. Not young. Not rich. Not witty. And married, of course.”1
Renato wants Jane to seize an opportunity for romance in her own life, even if the circumstances are not exactly perfect: “You're like a hungry child. Was given ravioli to eat. ‘No,’ you say, ‘I want beefsteak.’ My dear girl, you're hungry. Eat the ravioli.”2
Jane is convinced to give herself over, however temporarily, to Venice and Renato. They go to Burano, a nearby picturesque island, together and lose themselves in the fantasy of the affair. When they return to Venice, Renato continues the grand gestures and big speeches, but Jane has come back to Earth. She has decided to leave Venice early, fearing she will stay too long and sour the experience. Jane insists on going to the train herself, just a few hours after telling Renato she is leaving. Still, when getting on the train, she finds herself looking for him at the station.
Renato comes running through the station just as the train is pulling away. They stretch for each other, but he cannot catch up. At the last moment, he pulls out what he is carrying for her: another gardenia. The film ends with Jane waving goodbye to her gardenia, to Renato and to Venice. She’s weepy, but content. All three objects of her love have to stay in this place and she must go. In contrast to the first vision of Venice that we get in the film, though Jane’s camera, we end with her in the shot, waving goodbye.
By all means a romantic film! But a romance? What do we get if we have a central love story and an optimistic ending (that I would call a happily ever after), but the couple is not physically together at the end of the story?3
Lean and his romantic background
Summertime might seem an oddity in David Lean’s filmography, especially if you are only familiar with the ones mentioned in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. (The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia). It is easy to think of his oeuvre mostly in terms of tragic, colonial epics. Movies about men made bureaucrats and whose spirits will be broken by the terms of British violence abroad (that they are committing). Doctor Zhivago moves this needle a little bit—there at least we have a central tragic love story, but Lean is also really interested in the character of Pasha: the idealist man made violent by his politics, a student organizer who becomes a draconian military leader. A Passage to India, an adaptation of the EM Forster masterpiece, hints at an interest in violence born and enacted by white English women abroad as well. All four of these movies are nearly three hours long (or longer!)
Brief Encounter, which I think most millennial film buffs would say is actually his best film, has an 87 minute run time and limited setting. The dramatic, longing, quiet love story between two married people who meet at a train station and conduct their emotional affair while waiting for their trains, is one of the most heart-wrenching, soul-crushing films I’ve ever seen. And in a lot of ways, it feels like the opposite of Lawrence.
Summertime could be considered the metaphorical fulcrum between the two and the literal bridge between two eras of Lean’s filmography. All the movies before Summertime are inside movies, and all of his movies after are what I think of as outside movies. Lean doesn’t totally abandon the drawing room interiors of the first half of his career for Summertime, but the film was shot entirely in post-war Venice. The film has a crisp 100 minute run time. There’s a love story that ends at a train station (like Brief Encounter, The Passionate Friends and Doctor Zhivago), there’s an outsider looking in and fretting about their place in it all (like Oliver Twist, Great Expectation and Lawrence of Arabia) The director himself called it his favorite of his films. I think it is the most romantic too and I think romance is how we can zoom out to view the full horizon of his work and reconcile the poles.
Many of Lean’s movies have a romance to them, even when they are not romantic in their plot lines. In Romantics and Modernist in British Cinema, John Orr tracks a parallel between T.E. Lawrence and David Lean and their romanticism within confines of British systms: “The film is a full-blooded romantic dance with the image of its troubled desert hero. Yet because Lean at heart is a conservative revolutionary, the film is reflexive: his Lawrence is forced to regulate his enthusiasm through obligation to the British military just as Lean, as director, is constrained to temper his romantic vision through the structuring of the well-made film. For Lawrence, the conflict is a heartfelt dilemma that finally shatters him, but for Lean one suspects the paradox is latent, not manifest.”
Orr links Lean with the other, older studio beholden British directors—he is working within a system. Though he works through the 1980s, he does not pick up the radical realism of the 1960s in British film. I think it is telling that after Summertime, Lean never makes a contemporary film again. They’re all period pieces—he has no interest in the disaffected youth counter culture that takes up Kitchen Sink Realism. His period pieces also never get the cheek of something like Barry Lyndon.
Of his division between romantics and realism in British film, Orr writes “romantics wish through art to transcend the fractured and divisive life world they see around them and recompose it, making their artistic mark by so doing…In film, paradoxically, the great British romantics like Hitchcock, Lean, Reed and Powell have often worked though classical ‘invisible’ narration and under tight censorship: the great romantic films invoke war and its aftermath or the end of Empire and frame within them the romantic ironies of personal passion. In British film romantic irony hinges to a great extent on the mismatch between public and personal passion: the great examples here would be Black Narcissus (1946) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).” Personal love is central to Lean because that is the avenue he uses to express his “conservative revolution” in the face of a failing empire. “To Lean, we’re all cogs, unless we aren’t and those are the narratives worth telling, but they are met with violent narrative suppression. That’s [the interesting] tragedy to Lean, not the actually violent modes of power.”
Summertime, Lean’s only film without any British characters, is not necessarily dealing with British colonial power, but Jane is the victim of Protestant reserve and anxiety that threads through so many of his films, especially the ones directly about sex. And she’s an author of a story in a foreign land. Jane’s makeover scene in common fare in a story about a woman falling in love, but in Lean’s filmography what it directly prefigures is T.E. Lawrence forsaking his British military uniform in favorite of a kaffiyeh and agal. Of course Summertime is Lean’s favorite of his own films: Jane is his avatar, fretting about what story to tell in the face of and as acolyte of the system of her own anxiety. And her ending is so much more triumphant than Lawrence’s.
genre genealogy
If the plot of Summertime happened in a 2024 novel, we would call it women’s fiction. I mostly know the term “women’s fiction” from people fretting about it. No one seems to like it, despite it’s continued presence as a term. Romance readers worry about women’s fiction encroaching the aesthetics and market share of romance. Women writers wonder why that has to be the name at all (maybe just call it fiction?) The way that I mostly see it deployed is when a novel looks like a romance, is marketed as a romance, but does not have an HEA. Reviewers and readers will come out and says “actually…that’s women’s fiction.”
As a 1955 film, Summertime could be considered a “woman’s film,” which is a real thing with a similar name to women’s fiction, but different origins and genre boundaries. This genre term has a much shorter life than women’s fiction and a narrower definition, defined after the heyday of the genre, the 1940s and 50s, was over. I primarily associate the genre with George Cukor (frequent collaborator with Hepburn), Douglas Sirk, and William Wyler. Notably, the vast majority of woman’s films are written and directed by men, while women’s fiction does tend to be written by women. Maria LaPlace defines the film genre as “distinguished by its female protagonist, female point of view and its narrative which most often revolves around the traditional realms of women’s experience.”4
Central to any woman’s film is the lead actress and because this is old Hollywood, the actresses bring big parts of the personal arcs to the readings of the film. Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford are always partly Stanwyck, Davis and Crawford in their roles and Hepburn is no different. Hepburn’s steeliness, her vestal godliness, her electrifying self-composure that is the object of frenzied desire in the first half of her career. Those qualities become stiffened armor by the 1950s. She is now playing old maids, character who, in their own timelines, haven’t yet gotten softened by the wit and charm of Cary Grant or never met their match in the bull-doggedness of Spencer Tracy.
Summertime, on a plot level, fits women’s fiction/woman’s film. It’s the story of a woman who is yearning for something and lands on something adjacent to it. Jane is a character who is deeply embarrassed by her desire for connection. At the pensione, she asks to spend time with the fellow travelers and when she is rebuffed, mostly out of selfish focus on their own romances, she breathily laughs and makes herself the joke. Renato provides another model for Jane, where when there are off-ramps for her to balk or panic, like the antique glasses he might be lying about or the revelation about his marriage, he stays steadily in front of her.
In my summary of the plot, I worried that Renato sounded too manipulative or shady. I don’t think he needs not to be those things in order for this story to be incredibly romantic. Even we read Renato’s acts in the worst faith (maybe the glasses are fake! maybe he did hide his marriage because he just wanted to sleep with Jane!) if he is taking advantage of Jane’s affection for Italy, of her romanticism about the city, by obfuscating the “truth” of their circumstances, the stakes are different because Jane knows the relationship is necessarily temporarily. In the origin text, The Time of the Cuckoo by Arthur Laurents, Renato chooses to end the relationship, not the Jane character, who is named Leona in the play. Lean shifts the onus and the storytelling.
In the play, Leona Samish is striving for perfection. She wants her trip to Venice to be perfect, she wants her interactions with everyone to be perfect, and she seems to only trust things that she can hold onto very tightly. She’s also an alcoholic and drinks to excess. When she is drunk, she berates people when they are not her perfect vision of them. In the film, Jane’s charm is less stressful or forced. And perfection is not a mandate of her life, but a fiction by her of her memory.
Leona in the original play has a camera that she uses like a tourist, but Jane’s figures much more strongly in the plot of the film and I think this difference, is one of the things that makes me say “romance” when watching the film, which I did not feel when I read the original play. In Summertime, Jane Hudson, secretary from Akron, Ohio does not “end up” with Renato Brazzi, shopkeeper from Venice. But while in Venice, she was a part of the story of Jane and Renato, Lovers in a Fairy Tale, that has a finite ending other than betrayal, death or anger because it is a story, produced and framed by Jane with her film director’s eye. Lean gives so much control to Jane in how the story unfolds, including moments where she gives herself over to chaos.
I’ve said before one of the things that links genre fiction romance, particularly historical romance, with chivalric romances and fairy tales is the falsity of the passage of time. Things happen quickly and the halt quickly. Mikhail Bakhtin, when describing how time passes in a chivalric romance, points how the miracle of “suddenly” storytelling becomes the norm. Suddenly Jane is being noticed by an Italian. Suddenly he kisses her. Suddenly she decides to end their love story. On the passage of time, Bakthin says: “In general the chivalric romance exhibits a subjective playing with time, an emotional and lyrical stretching and compressing of it.”5
There is not world where Jane and Renato end up together—he is married and divorce wouldn’t be allowed in Italy until the 1970s. Plus, she has a life in Ohio, he has a life in Venice. No connection between them lasts forever, like the gardenia that would inevitably wilt. But in contrast to The Time of the Cuckoo, where the heroine has to learn a lesson about wanting something so badly she crushes it, Jane is rewarded for saying yes! to the ravioli and gets to direct her perfect, Venetian love story. Even if it has a truncated ending at a train station.
Happily ever after, even if the couple is together, is a truncation! Or a compression, as Bakhtin might phrase it. It’s prevarication about the fundamental truth of telling stories about humans: that we will die. When we read a romance, we’re buying into a momentary, structural lie. Lean just lets Jane be the author of the romance this time, instead of only the heroine of it.
recommendations
The Passionate Friends (1949, dir. by David Lean): My other favorite Lean. Definitely not a romance, but it plays with time beautifully and it is criminally under watched, partially because it hasn’t been on home media in a long time. I think the easiest way to watch it is on Criterion Channel. But it has some of my absolute favorite Lean close-ups and is the first of three collaborations with his wife Ann Todd, who just has one of the all time great faces. They don’t get to Italy in this movie, they go to the Swiss Alps. But being abroad is also very important in it!
Certified Copy (2010, dir. Abbas Kiarostami): Italy gets to you, man! Time is loopy and compressed and expansive here. One of the movies I think about more than anything else. Possibly future non-romance romance!
The Flamethrowers (2013, by Rachel Kushner): Another Italy invades your mind story. The main character, nicknamed Reno, is an artist who also races motorcycles and dates the scion of an Italian tire company. The story is about both her racing and making earth art in the 1970s and the origins of the tire company in Italy. The two stories run into each other when she visits Italy with her boyfriend in the last third of the book.
The patronizing confusion of an English/American heroine in the face of Italian contradictions is as long as the genre of tourist literature. Lucy Honeychurch of A Room with View, when trying to process the fact that she has just seen a man murder his friend in Piazza Signoria in Florence, says to George Emerson “And the murderer tried to kiss him, you say—how very odd Italians are!—and gave himself up to the police! Mr. Beebe was saying that Italians know everything, but I think they are rather childish.”
This, of course, reminds me of my other favorite Italian-cheating-love story, Moonstruck (1987) and Ronny’s big speech to Loretta about waiting for things to be perfect: “Love don't make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!”
I don’t think the RWA definition is good, but since people cling to it, I’ll also point out that they do not mention a committed relationship at the end of the story either. Their version of a HEA is “an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending,” with the explanation: “in a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.” I imagine RWA meant “unconditional love” to mean “relationship” but also: that’s not what they wrote!
Maria LaPlace, “Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film: Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager,” in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (1987), p. 139
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. E-book, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981