Summertime is a film about a woman falling in love with Venice. David Lean said he put more of himself into it than any other film he ever made. Katharine Hepburn said there were two love affairs on that production. Only one of them shows up in the credits.
“I’ve put more of myself in that film than any other I’ve ever made.”
David Lean said this about Summertime. He said it late in his career, looking back across Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge on the River Kwai, across the most monumental images in British cinema, and he chose the film about a middle-aged American secretary on holiday in Venice. He became so enamoured with Venice during production that he made it his second home. He said the film was his favourite among everything he directed.
Katharine Hepburn’s account of the same production is six words: “There were two love affairs.”
Her character’s with Rossano Brazzi. David’s with Venice.
She was being generous. Because in a film where the camera is meant to see Venice through Jane Hudson’s eyes, discovering it as a tourist discovers it, arriving innocent and departing changed, the camera already knows Venice too well. It lingers on the light on the water with the ease of someone who has been here before and intends to return. It frames the Piazza San Marco with the precision of a man who has already chosen his favourite angles. It cannot be naive about a city it loves this completely. And this is where the film, which thinks it is Jane’s story, reveals that it is, in a register the frame cannot quite conceal, David’s.
Summertime, directed by Lean and released in 1955, stars Hepburn as Jane Hudson, a self-described “fancy secretary” from Akron, Ohio, who has saved for years to spend her summer holiday in Venice alone. She arrives wide-eyed, 8mm camera in hand, photographing everything. She is, explicitly and without apology, a tourist: someone who has come to receive an experience rather than to inhabit a life. At the pensione where she stays she meets an American couple, a knowing Italian widow, and eventually Renato di Rossi (Rossano Brazzi), an antique dealer who courts her with confident warmth. She resists. He persists. They have an affair. She discovers he is married, or separated from his wife with his family still intact. She leaves on the train at the end of the summer. He runs alongside it. The film does not pretend this resolves into anything permanent.
| Director | David Lean |
|---|---|
| Year | 1955 |
| Runtime | 100 minutes |
| Cast | Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi, Isa Miranda, Darren McGavin |
| Awards | Academy Award nominations: Best Actress, Best Director; New York Film Critics Circle Best Director |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel, Max |
The previous review in this sequence examined Brief Encounter and its central paradox: that Laura’s confession to Fred, conducted entirely inside her own consciousness, is a monologue shaped like intimacy but answerable to no one. Summertime is the answer Lean found a decade later to the same question. Brief Encounter suppressed the feeling and kept it alive in narration. Summertime permits the feeling and sends the woman home on a train. Between those two solutions is a ten-year gap, and in that gap Lean left England, went to Venice, and fell in love with a place rather than a person. The question the two films are asking each other is whether he found his answer or only changed the subject.
“The camera cannot pretend to arrive innocent at a city its director has already made his home. Every shot of Venice in Summertime is lit by a love the character has not yet earned. Jane is discovering what the film already knows.”
The scene the film is most famous for has always been read as comedy and tenderness. Jane is photographing Renato’s shop from across a canal bridge, stepping backwards to get the full frame, and falls. Into the canal. The water is filthy; the nets below the surface, placed there by the crew, prevent her from sinking. Lean filmed this four times until he was satisfied. He had poured disinfectant into the spot but this made the water foam, which only increased Hepburn’s reluctance. She had been warned about the water’s condition and was not eager to be in it. Lean persuaded her. He needed the shot. That night, Hepburn’s eyes began to itch and tear. She was diagnosed with a rare form of conjunctivitis and carried it for the remainder of her life and career.
The shot exists because the director’s love for Venice required it. Jane falls into the canal because she is so intent on photographing the city that she loses her footing in it. She is the tourist swallowed by her own desire to capture the place. The film stages this as charming and even redemptive, a moment of ungainly humanity that opens her to Renato’s attention. What the scene also is, in its actual production history, is a director so intimate with this city, so committed to his own vision of it, that he will film his leading actress falling into its waters until the take is right. Hepburn’s eye infection is not a footnote. It is the difference between what the film cost Jane and what the film cost Katharine. Jane goes home with a memory. Katharine went home with something in her eyes she could never entirely clear.
The play the film is based on was written by Arthur Laurents and titled The Time of the Cuckoo. The cuckoo, as the play’s epigraph explained, is a summer visitant to Europe. It arrives, announces the season of love, and leaves. Lean and his producers changed the title immediately, finding it obscure. But what they changed with it was the play’s self-awareness about what Jane is. In the original, Jane knows she is the cuckoo: she has always known her visits would be brief, her presences provisional, her loves unable to root themselves in the soil of anyone else’s permanent life. Lean stripped the third act down to its romantic bones. He removed most of what made the play ambivalent about whether Jane’s summer in Venice constitutes growth or consolation dressed as growth. He gave the camera his own feeling about the city and told it to pass through her eyes.
The film to hold alongside this one is Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019), and the friction is immediate. Sciamma’s film is also about looking: a painter commissioned to produce a portrait of a woman who does not wish to be painted, who must be observed secretly, whose image is being constructed without her full knowledge or consent. The formal question the film asks, openly and with great precision, is what it means to look at someone, what the looker wants from the looking, and what the subject of the looking is permitted to want in return. The answer Portrait of a Lady on Fire reaches is that true looking requires reciprocity: the painter cannot paint Marianne honestly until Marianne is also looking back at her, and the film’s most charged moments are precisely those of mutual vision rather than directorial gaze.
Summertime does not have this reciprocity. Lean looks at Venice and calls it Jane’s perspective. Venice looks back at Jane through Renato, and the film calls it romance. But the exchange is not equal. Jane is always the tourist, always the visitor, always the woman with an 8mm camera trying to get the shot. The camera behind her has already composed the shot, has already chosen the light, has already fallen in love with the subject she is only beginning to understand. She is discovering what the film already knows. That is a very particular relationship between a director and his protagonist, and Summertime cannot name it because it is too busy being beautiful.
The final image: the train pulling away, Renato running alongside it, Jane’s hand reaching out from the window not quite able to hold on. The film ends in the gap between the hand and what it cannot reach. It is one of the most beautiful endings in Lean’s work, and it is entirely his. Jane is leaving. Lean stayed. He made Venice his home. He called this film his favourite. The spot where Katharine Hepburn fell into the canal is still pointed out to tourists by guides. Venice absorbed the film and kept it. The film thought it was telling Jane’s story about a summer. It was also telling David’s story about a place he intended never to leave. Whether those two stories can be the same film is the question Summertime cannot ask about itself, because the camera is already on one side of the answer.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945): reviewed in the previous post in this sequence — the film that suppressed the feeling where Summertime permitted it, and the companion piece that shows how Lean’s relationship to the same question changed across a decade. Read together, the two films are a single argument about what it costs a woman to have the experience and what it costs her not to.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019): the film about looking that asks what Summertime does not — whose desire organises the frame, and what happens to the story when the person behind the camera and the person whose interiority the film inhabits are not separated by a gulf of unequal longing.
UnspokenCinema publishes every week. No ratings. No rankings. Just what films reveal without meaning to.