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It is there, where Jane (Katharine Hepburn) and Renato (Rossano Brazzi) lose themselves in the shadows of Venice’s walls, their enigmatic faces observed only through the reflection of moonlight upon the city’s tranquil waters, and the lovers’ delightful fear of not knowing what discourse and actions lie ahead stretches into a brief yet prolonged silence, keeping us, the audience, in the same agonizing anticipation as their respective audience members (for Jane, Renato, and for Renato, Jane), that the three elements of city, love, and nostalgia converge into a singular bond, and Summertime becomes an enduring example of a kind of phototouristic cinema.
It is a cinema that presents us with an image and a definition of a celebrated city as the filmmaker sees it and wishes to see it, and ultimately leaves us with nothing but its memory. (In the film’s final moments, Jane leaves the white flower behind in Venice and takes only its memory with her.) The protagonists of this cinema are strangers (tourists) who have arrived in the city in question for the first time (here, only Jane), and this very condition of being a tourist and an outsider makes the city appear touristic even when it is not. It causes the non-foreign inhabitants of the city to take on an air of anonymity and transience (most notably, the fact that the language spoken by the city’s people is not shared by the principal characters further intensifies this estrangement of the hosts), so that their gradual disappearance hardly registers, and the city becomes, in a sense, emptied for the lovers—or, more precisely, made to appear empty.
Of course, this event in Summertime is delayed. If you pay attention, it is only toward the end of the film that we witness the two lovers wandering through their own dreamlike Venice. In the opening of the film, we are confronted with a Venice that is thoroughly crowded and saturated, and with every turn of Jane’s head, a mass of indistinguishable tourists comes into view.
The identical quality of this imagery is articulated at the beginning of the film by the man inside the train:
“Some people find it too quiet,
some people find it too noisy.”
And later, the contradiction in the behavior of the middle-aged couple who share Jane’s hotel also conveys the same idea.
But what is the reason for this duality? What is it other than David Lean’s deliberate separation of thought and outlook from the city, and his reluctance to offer a personal interpretation of Venice? In fact, Lean’s Venice is not the symphony that Walter Ruttmann made of Berlin, a cinema of truth intended to articulate the multiplicity of aspects and readings of a city and its people. Here, what emerges instead is that the transformation of the protagonist’s convictions and state of mind gradually transforms Venice as well, adapting itself to Jane’s inner changes at every moment.
This is why, at different points throughout the city, we see both garbage being thrown into its waterways and people growing exasperated by the heat, as well as birds ascending and descending, and sunlight falling upon dark waters whose waves play with the glimmer of the colorful flowerpots adorning the houses.
Thus, this emphasis on Jane finding and expressing her own personal and genuine perspective is one of the conscious aims of the creators of Summertime, rather than merely an unintended occurrence noticed after the production had been completed. It goes so far that we are dealing exclusively with Jane’s perception of the world around her, rather than observing the filmmakers’ perception of it.
Granting this ownership to Jane is so powerful and so compelling that the audience has no choice but to follow it. The result is that, with some insistence in our phrasing, we can say that Lean has arrived at one of the central characteristics of this cinema: we enter Venice with Jane, experience Venice with Jane, and ultimately leave Venice with Jane.
And, of course, by Jane we do not mean the course of her life and the events that happen to her, which would leave the audience at the level of a mere observer—the familiar voyeur. What is meant is that the audience becomes part of Jane’s experience, her insight, perception, and emotions. The audience advises her to return to the antique shop (something beyond simply feeling delighted that she has gone back to the store); the audience wants her not to look for the missing shoe, but to leave it somewhere in the city as a sign of preserving her bond with Venice—which, as she herself says, is where she has spent the best moments of her life—and so on and so forth…
It is therefore worth noting that the reason for Jane’s long shadow over the film lies in all of the above, and that directing this toward the clichéd term “strong characterization” would be an imprecise move, surrendering our reasoning to familiar words that generally function as a declaration of position—and usually a shallow one at that.
Because, quite deliberately, the writer does not dissect Jane’s character—neither her social and familial relationships nor her moral foundations—and does not search for the logic of her actions in her dramatic past, precisely so that the audience’s attention does not wander beyond Venice. In fact, one of the strengths of the drama lies in our ignorance: we do not know why Jane, a woman approaching fifty, has now come in pursuit of the very thing she has been searching for all her life, nor do we know why, after discovering it, she lets it go.
And one of the film’s most compelling qualities is precisely David Lean’s willingness to walk freely along such paths of the unknown—especially for a director whose intellectual foundations are rooted in the studio system, and who, as such, ought not to give so much room to ambiguity or send the audience away without explanation or interpretation.

Of course, with all these explanations in mind, one must admit that Lean’s perennial nostalgia for love, given the romantic demands of the work, inevitably spills over onto the city as well, becoming an excuse for observations whose roots are somewhat difficult to locate within the dry ground of reality and which seem more intent on making the impossible possible.
For example, in one scene, the music of Alessandro Cicognini, the sound of the river’s waves, and church bells are heard simultaneously, drawing our attention. In other scenes, we notice that the colors of Jane’s clothes harmonize with the colors of her surroundings. Or there is Jane’s repeated and comic pronunciation of the hotel’s name, as she tries to pronounce it like an Italian: Pensione Fiorini.
It must be said that these things are present from the very beginning of the film, but they are merely the sweet tone that emerges from the romantic language of the work; they are not attempts to recreate the city or construct Lean’s personal world. It is as though Lean, too, has handed the work over to Jane and given her his camera!
Remember that Jane enters Venice with a movie camera and begins filming! But filming what? On the surface, she is recording Venice’s tourist attractions and its ostentatious architecture. But then why does she stop filming at the beginning of the second act, when she feels that she has arrived at that magical, secret, and wondrous miracle she speaks of at the beginning?
It is something the ever-present boy in moments of crisis—the guardian angel of Jane—points toward and makes us notice.
The reason is that Jane, like Lean, is searching for a dream at the beginning of her journey, and the movie camera is a clever aid that the filmmaker has given her. And when the dream begins, Jane puts the camera aside.
And yet… Lean still has the camera in his hands.