I know that I am a couple weeks behind schedule, but I finally saw (500) Days of Summer yesterday evening. Though I did not have that overwhelming "I LOVE THIS MOVIE!!" sort of reaction to the film, I did find it clever and very interesting on several levels. Beyond the almost sickeningly cute Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the very enjoyable indie-tastic soundtrack, I was fascinated by the emphasis placed on surface levels in the film and by the film's self-referential nature. There was frequent reference to the film's fiction and to the filmic apparatus.
The film's nonlinear narrative structure is surely designed to simulate the way that memory works; it jumps from time to time and place to place, inspired by a thought or emotion or connection. This was a clever choice by the filmmakers. I think that this sort of a narrative structure also has the potential to remind the viewer of the filmmaking process. As scenes in films are almost never shot in chronological order, the structure of (500) Days followed a pattern similar to the way it might actually be filmed. Other elements such as the voice-over narration, the addition of animation, and the use of split screen to display alternate narrative trajectories all call attention to the film as a constructed text.
One of the most interesting scenes in terms of the film's metafictional qualities is a(n almost annoyingly) sweet scene in which the two leads are walking (and then running) through an Ikea. They play house in Ikea's stylized artificial living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, constructing a fake life together, and then when trying to work the sink or the television or some other useless prop, the fiction is broken (or at least complicated). This scene can be seen as a metaphor for the entire film and for the genre of romantic comedies. It is a constructed world, and the thing to remember is that it isn't real; it is all artifice. The sinks don't work.
One of my favorite parts of the film is at the very beginning of the film when the voice-over narration informs the viewer that "this is NOT a love story." I think that this reminder functions in much the same way that René Magritte's The Treachery of Images functions. In much the same way that Magritte reminds the observer that they are not looking at a pipe, that they are looking at a representation of a pipe, the words of the narration serve to remind the viewer that the object they are consuming is not a love story, is not a relationship--it is the filmic depiction of a relationship; it is a a fiction.
It is ironic that so many reviews of the film comment on the realism of the relationship when the film tries so hard to make known its fiction, but maybe that is the "real" relationship the viewer is supposed to take notice of--the precarious relationship between mediated images and our conceptions of reality.
