MovieChat Forums > Summertime (1955) Discussion > We were discussing this film and wondere...

We were discussing this film and wondered (SPOILERS)..

posted 18 years ago by gaelicguy
11 replies | jump to latest

what your thoughts and opinions were to the following questions:

A) Do you think Jane believed Renato regarding the authenticity of the goblet?
B) Why do you think Jane leaves as abruptly as she does and waits until the very last to tell Renato?
C) Can you envision any reason why Jane would stay longer, perhaps permanently, in this lovely relationship or had she found what needed/wanted and decided it 'was time to leave the party?

Suffice to say, there are no wrong or right answers -- but I would be intensely interested in what others think about these questions. So, ladies and gentlemen, the telephone lines are open.

Give thanks for a little and you will find a lot.

[–] BlueGreen 18 years ago

You do offer a string of very interesting questions, GaelicGuy.
Don't be discouraged if there are no answers yet.
I'll gladly post my opinions once I've watched the film again. (I only recently got the DVD - and now my DVD player is broken...)

Anyway, I'd like to read other people's replies, too.

[–] gvh-6 17 years ago

I think the film gives space for audiences to form their own vision about the story.

Jane as secretary must be a very detailed and formulated girl who facinates romance but suspicious and opinionated when it takes place.

Well to the questions of the thread starter, I would provide my opinions as follows:

A) Do you think Jane believed Renato regarding the authenticity of the goblet?

== No, she doesn't believe it's from 18th century.

B) Why do you think Jane leaves as abruptly as she does and waits until the very last to tell Renato?

== She gives her answer in the film that she has to leave when she is aboe to.
She tells Renato until the very last to give not way back.

C) Can you envision any reason why Jane would stay longer, perhaps permanently, in this lovely relationship or had she found what needed/wanted and decided it 'was time to leave the party?

== Renato makes very clear to love at the moment instead of talking love.
Jane wishes a man like Renato as life partner instead of lover of a
sommertime.

However, in the end the sommertime will be a memory of life time for Jane.
Maybe short but beautiful.

What do you think?

[–] BlueGreen 17 years ago

I must say that I haven't given that much thought to the goblet (which is, of course, a very important symbol here), a least not regarding Jane's thoughts about its authenticity. However, I feel inclined to say no - she didn't believe it.

She leaves abruptly because she has come to realise that she has fallen in love with Renato - and, of course, that there is no real future for them. A clandestine relationship like theirs can only be a short-lived affair if one of the lovers is a foreigner with no other motive to stay in a foreign city. (I am emphasising this because Katharine's own private life is a clear demonstration that, in different circumstances, a clandestine relationship CAN be very very long-lived...)

And yet, even knowing all that Jane feels that she would be unable to leave if she stayed for just a day or two longer. Love (and the IDEA of romance) would prevail over her - and then she would have found herself stuck in a situation that she would see as unworthy of her.

She sums it up very concisely when Renato tells her that he will "always" love her, to which she replies: "Yes - if I leave."

She had no alternative but to leave - ASAP. That way, she could preserve not onlyher dignity but also the memory of that (literally) once-in-a-lifetime romance. You can see all that going through her... heart, not really the mind, in the last scene, when she is looking through the train window back to Venice vanishing in the distance, along with her one and only romantic love. Even before Venice has completely disappeared from the horizon, Renato has already become the ultimate romantic fantasy - the (almost Platonic) ideal of the perfect love that will keep Jane's heart warm during the years to come. She has become a Woman - she *too*, like other women (embodied in the film by the young American woman from the Pensione Fiorini), has experienced LOVE.

There are many many other aspects in this film, but it would take a minor dissertation to analyse them. ;)

So, in brief: there is no way she could have stayed in Venice - OR come back, for that matter. She is leaving for good, and she knows it.

[–] suze-4 17 years ago

Having just seen this in the Criterion edition I thought I'd reply! I realize this was written one year ago and maybe you won't even check for answers this late, but anyway, here goes:

A) I don't think she believed him. She was very angry as anyone would be. However, she was so attracted to him that I think she forgot all about it. I'd believe him. Just look at the way he looks at her. He is obviously a fantastic lover. The question of the glasses and whether he lied becomes unimportant when hormones are so strong.

B) I totally related to her leaving abruptly. We see her no-nonsense personality throughout much of the picture. She just has this streak of longing for romance, and her tendency is not to give in to it, but fight it for a while. Ultimately he is irresistible to her, but the pragmatic side is her main core and she knows she can't move to Venice to be with a married man, not even if he divorced his wife. It just isn't in her so she has to go quickly...like pulling a bandaid off fast so it will hurt less.

C) I cannot see any way Jane would decide to stay in Venice longer, or permanently. Not even if he promised to divorce his wife. I think she was quite aware that he says things that might not be true: the glass was not antique, and he will never leave his wife. As I said above, Jane is not romantic at heart. Her head rules her heart totally. But she needed an outlet for her love of beauty and romance, something she missed(perhaps a romance she still misses that happened in her youth). She also knew when to go home, as she explained to him at the end.

I have had brief romances like this with mysterious, handsome men, knew I had to never see them again, and I pined for them a lot longer than I bet she pined for him...I imagine her going home to America to her normal job, friends, practical life and probably remaining a spinster or perhaps marrying a stodgy, reliable man she is fond of.

PS, just a few notes on the film rather than look for several other threads to place these thoughts:

I see it differently now that I'm older. The first time I saw it on TV(about 20 years ago) she seemed old to me...now she seems young. Ah, time passing changes everything, relatively speaking.

Rosanno Brazzi seems too good to be true in this movie and can't they bottle whatever he had? He played the professor that Jo married in Little Women and I loved him in that too...when I was only 8. He had such a beautiful singing voice...it was not used enough in this movie but at least there he sang a little bit.

Whether playing a married cad or an honest man, he seems like he'd be devastating as a lover. No wonder even the pragmatic Jane fell head over heels. You do have to suspend disbelief a great deal for this. The coincidence of seeing him in the shop where she sees the goblet, the day after she catches him staring at her on the piazza, etc.

I love the technicolour opening with the splashy titles. I love the wardrobe, one of the dresses buttons at the back - a real 1955 touch, along with the crinoline skirts and short heeled backless mules in both white and red...my sister wore things like this in high school. I wonder who did the wardrobe - I immediately thought of Edith Head, but then, it seems all the credits are Italian people. I love the beauty shop scene and wish she came out with long, wavy hair. Alas, the pinned up hair is used as a symbol of repression. It only comes down when her heart is starting to melt along with her schoolmarmish tendencies.

The scene where she falls in the canal makes me cringe every time, knowing it ruined her health permanently. I think they would use a stunt double nowadays. I wonder why they didn't.

Well, it's a lovely movie. The Criterion edition had some choppy editing, which surprised me. But they made a whole new negative and print and the colours are glorious. It just goes a bit abruptly when changing two of the scenes. I can't compare it with anything else, as I've only ever seen it on TV where of course it was cut up with commercials anyway.

[–] Eva1-1 14 years ago

I think the fact that they didn't use a stunt double was probably Ms. Hepburn's choice. She was such an athletic woman, apparenty good at all sports, and was even known to enjoy swimming in the frigid Atlantic Ocean in cold weather (I read that she continued these cold water swims even into old age). I'm sure if Lean asked if she would do the canal stunt herself, she had no problem with it, as she was a wonderful swimmer, it was summer and the water was warm. Too bad they obviously didn't know how horribly poluted it was. Then again, nobody had a problem with drinking tap water back then, and now, people think you're crazy if you do it!

[–] TooSlim 14 years ago

I don't know of him singing in any movie...If you are referring to Rossano Brazzi singing in "South Pacific", he did not. He was dubbed. But he IS beautiful!

[–] rogerneon 15 years ago

A) I actually think she DOES believe that it's an antique goblet. If it weren't, it would have been quite easy for him to "suddenly find" another one like it.

B) I think Jane didn't leave that abruptly, at least not for her. She left when she had been scheduled to all along so that she could make connections for her trip home. She refrained from telling Renato to keep their last days/hours together from becoming an argument.

C) Jane is a very practical, sensible woman, and I think she clearly sees that there is no future for her in Venice. Neither she nor Renato is rich, and Renato is already supporting a family as well as a wife he's separated from. I doubt he could support a mistress as well. And a mistress has no rights-- he could dump her at any moment, leaving her thousands of miles from home in a strange country. Also, in 1955 there was NO divorce in Italy for ANY reason, and it's doubtful the Italian government would have recognized a divorce obtained in another country.

However, I also don't think that the last time Jane and Renato ever saw each other was when her train pulled out of the station. I think she visited Venice again, was sensible enough to not have high expectations, and also didn't warn Renato that she was coming. As to what happened when she walked into his shop... well, who knows?

[–] pharmom 14 years ago

rogerneon wrote "... As to what happened when she walked into his shop... well, who knows?"

Yes! And I'd love to see someone write that.

[–] nycsean10014 9 years ago

Finally! Someone who thinks that she did indeed believe Renato's explanation about the goblet. I agree. The explanation he gives is eminently sensible (that glassmakers in Venice continue to work with designs that have lasted hundreds of years). But also, Renato's demeanor when he is suddenly confronted with the half-dozen similar glasses is simply too calm and smooth to have been produced on the spur of the moment. In addition, he sold the glass to Hepburn at a LOWER price than the others, so he certainly was not taking advantage of his claim that it was genuine 18th-century to exact a higher price.

Why all these other commentators agree that she did not believe his explanation is a mystery to me. There is not one element of her behavior that could be cited in support of that contention.

Allen Roth

"I look up; I look down."

[–] onepotato2 15 years ago

Jane's infatuation with Renato comes too late, in both her life and in her stay in Venice. She doesn't really know what to do with her time in Venice before she meets him, except to put on a game face, pretend to be joyous and let her midwestern constraints suppress any real experience.

[–] npaxton-3 15 years ago

Even before Jane came to Venice she wanted to find romance there. Not being experienced in that area, however, she dreamed of a perfect romance with a wealthy, good looking Italian who would spirit her away to his villa on the Amalfi Coast where they would live happily forever and she would never have to go back to her job again - or somesuch unattainable fantasy. As she comes to realize, the man that she finally loves is a middle aged (although gorgeous and sexy) shopkeeper who is separated from his wife but supporting his family and will never be able to get a divorce. It starts with her gut knowledge that the goblet is not real. She comes to the point of acknowledging that she wants more than souvenir glass to bring home even if it is not a perfect fantasy.
She leaves because she realized that she was always the girl who "stayed too long at the dance"; who could never admit that a friendship or relationship was over. She even says that at one point. It ripped her heart out to leave but she needed to go while they still loved each other so they would always remember those beautiful moments. I think she understood that all relationships end whether they be two weeks in duration or fifty years. This particular romance had to end when it did because she was finally wise enough to see that there could be no good future in it.