500 Days of 400 Blows

You've seen Michael Webb's 2009 movie 500 Days of Summer, right? The film proclaims from the outset: "This is not a love story." There is, however, lots to love about the film: Joseph Gordon-Levitt has done some very nice growing up since his performance as the adorably love-struck Cameron James in 10 Things I Hate About You; the soundtrack is a truly excellent mix of Regina Spektor, Feist, Carla Bruni, Simon & Garfunkel; the story is refreshing; there's an excellent dance scene to Hall and Oates You Make My Dreams; and Zooey Deschanel is without question my #1 girl crush.

But I think my favorite thing about the film is its smart intertextuality. One scene is a reference to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal in which my #1 boy crush, Antonius Block (played by Max von Sydow), plays chess with Death.

In 500 Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character plays against cupid. Look familiar?

Of course, I'm not the first one to pick up on that allusion. In fact, the IMDB site has a whole page of move connections, and people far more film-savvy than I have found references to films like He Who Gets Slapped (1924), Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), Blade Runner (1982), and another Harrison Ford performance as Hans Solo in Star Wars: Episode IV (1977) when Gordon-Levitt's character catches his his reflection in a window.

One reference I have yet to see mentioned, though, is the soliloquies on love, a veiled reference to the French New Wave classic, Les quatre cent coups or in English, The 400 Blows (1959). There are several famous scenes from François Truffaut's film that get cited over and over: the spinning ride at the fair, the Punch and Judy puppet show, freeze frame. The most famous is arguably the scene in which the young protagonist answers the questions of an offscreen psychologist and the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud's lines are said to be entirely improvised. And I think Michael Webb is playing off that important moment in cinematic history here.

Both scenes are shot in black and white, and the camera frames the actors from mid-torso or shoulders up. In both scenes, the characters respond to offstage questions. Even more, in both 400 Blows and 500 Days, the characters discuss their relationships to women - romantic ones, exclusively, in Webb's film, but in Truffaut's Léaud talks about both disappointed sexual encounters when he responds to the question, "Tu as jamais couché avec une fille?"* and his relationship to his (rather absent) mother.

And maybe we can suggest that Webb is even playing off of titles here: 500 Days of Summer and 400 Blows?

Do you ever wish you could just watch movies without having to stop halfway through to make a blogpost about intertextuality? Education has its ups and downs.

*Have you ever slept with a girl?