[sketches in a moleskine]

It’s that time of the year in Sydney, when you start to freeze your ass off but you get to freeze your ass of in the knowing comfort that the Sydney Film Festival is right around the corner. It’s been about 5 years since I last attended a session at the film festival, back than it was suffice to line up on the night of the film to grab tickets, a lot has changed in the film circles since then and I have managed to miss out on tickets to the festival 5 years running – I just wasn’t convinced I had to pre purchase tickets days in advance until this year. With the festival period shrinking in size the organisers have managed to squeeze in quite a few films into the program this year. Tickets I managed to pre-purchase this year were ‘500 Days of Summer’ and the new film by Jim Jarmusch ‘The Limits of Control’, that’s about the extent of what I could grab before the tickets went dry, other notable films that were of interest included 2 Soderbergh films: ‘ Che ‘ and ‘The Girlfriend Experience’.

‘500 Days of Summer‘ – I came home last night convinced I should have given this film an extra half a star on the voting sheet (that would have made it 41/2 out 5 instead of the 4 I gave it…unfortunately the festival did not accommodate half points in the voting process…). It’s been a while since I’ve walked out of the cinema wanting to go right back in and watch it again. That’s the kind of affect the film had on me. Without giving away the major details of the film, (you’ll have to see it when it debuts in October in Sydney and July in the U.S) it’s about the cycle of falling in love, the joy, the pain, the joy, the sleepless nights, the hope, and finally the letting go of that hope. So your typical boy meets girl kinda scenario, except Dir. Marc Webb has been able to inject a stream of realism into the characters that lends itself to the side of playful comedy and gives in to the raw side of human emotion and interaction. The film is told in a non-linear narrative and moves forward and back from day 1 to day 480 to day 15 and so forth and I think this is where the flow of the film really strengthens the viewer’s connection to the characters and the story. If you think about it for a second, and reflect back on your own experiences in love they are rarely ever played back in your mind in a linear sequence, you tend to rush through to the pivotal moments of the relationship and then flash back to the beginnings to make sense of it all. In the end it never really makes sense, and these dramatic sequences of high’s and low’s just continue to make up small and big fragments of your life. The film doesn’t give us a happy or a sad ending, it gives us an ending to a chapter, period. There are many moments in this film to savour, and enough to play it back in your own mind in a non-linear sequence.

P.S The soundtrack is great too…a prerequisite of any good film…of course.