Summer Evening

The scene is a verandah at night. Two youngsters are standing in the faint light. Surely it is a sad scene of disappointed love; but it is also certainly a richly ambivalent scene. The two people are lit as if they were on a stage, almost defenceless and yet with a manifest self-confidence. They are meeting in a clearly defined circumscribed territory, and the final frontier in Man’s onward progress involves conquest of the woman’s body. Summer Evening is like an invasion of privacy. Although the young couple are out of doors, they appear to be having a private conversation and would not welcome anyone butting in. Everything is full of sadness and bitterness of the romance that is about to soon end.