SUMMER HOURS

The family that Olivier Assayas tracks with his latest film, Summer Hours, is such a well-to-do, bourgeois clan that, initially, one can scarcely imagine many people identifying with them, particularly in a global economy that has placed millions of previously middle-class citizens in a position lower than that of this family’s maidservant. And yet the film remains one of the most profoundly humanistic and relatable movies of recent years. It is a work of quiet grace, a gliding, meditative elegy that passes over generation gaps so gently and effortlessly that the poetry of its movement alone exposes the fragility of such a compartmentalizing concept.

The film opens upon, and symbolically concerns, a quaint manor in the south of France, one of the world’s most beautiful regions. The people there are, if at all possible, more stereotypically self-absorbed and haughty (and therefore “French”) than the Parisians, but it is exceedingly difficult to fault them for feeling superior in such a place. Many French productions exist only to show other countries, and remind its own citizens, of the South’s beauty, and part of Summer Hours’ charm is its sly adherence to this style for just the right amount of time to make us think that it’ll be yet another artistic tourist video before heading in another direction.

Instead, Assays focuses upon that wonderful brand of refined middle-class folk who populate the region, here typified by Hélène, a 75-year-old connoisseur who is as much a curator of her home as she is a resident. A fearsome matriarch, Hélène filters her considerable knowledge through the mannerisms and directness of a mother. She has that ability to calmly, even lovingly, point out flaws in her children’s professional and private lives, speaking without judgment as if her criticisms are facts and therefore not worth editorializing upon. Played by Edit Scob, 72 at the time of filming, Hélène scarcely looks 60 and would look even younger if not for her silvery hair; like her house, Hélène is immaculately preserved. (It has always puzzled me why so many Europeans went off to die in the Everglades looking for the secret to youth when it clearly existed somewhere in France already.)

So sharp is the matriarch that she knows her days are numbered. At the 75th birthday party that opens the film, one of her sons, Frédéric (Charles Berling) gives her a cordless telephone set, and the woman who immediately afterward receives a French translation of an art textbook to proofread suddenly looks confused and ignorant as she takes one look at the phone and its accessories and throws up her hands. Hélène takes Frédéric aside to discuss her will. Here the film ceases to be a paean to Southern France and becomes something far deeper. The son, the only of the three children to still live in France – Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) lives in America designing for a Japanese company, while Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) has relocated to China as an executive for shoe company Puma – wishes to hear none of this morbid talk, and he assures his mother that the various artworks and artifacts that line the manor shall pass down the line. But Hélène knows better, and she gives her son instructions on what to sell and how to divide the effects and the house.

A few months later, Hélène dies, an event left entirely off-screen. There are no long shots of Hélène tending her garden and collapsing à la Vito Corleone, no jarring telephone rings in the middle of the night; Assayas merely cuts from a cold, literally blue shot of the old woman sitting in her vacant home and Frédéric discussing burial plots with a funeral director. It is at this moment that the film truly begins and, while the narrative itself continues to slowly and unremarkably progress, it also marks the moment where Summer Hours begins to rapidly set itself apart from its contemporaries. The elision over the typical cinematic details as seen in the jump between life and death starts a recurring subversion of nearly all the screenwriting tropes that come with what could condescendingly be called “this kind of movie”.

Watch the way the three children interact with each other when the time comes to discuss the inheritance. Frédéric assumes that his siblings will want to keep the house in the family, as he does, but Adrienne and Jérémie clearly do not agree. Yet neither openly states dissent, sheepishly mentioning how far away they live (Adrienne even says that she’s been living away so long that France itself holds little intrinsic value). They also do not say aloud that Hélène was the only reason the siblings ever got together anymore, and her funeral will likely be the trio’s last time together for years. Frédéric understands his siblings perfectly without them outright saying it. Later, when he and Jérémie discuss appraisals and tax deductions with an adviser, Jérémie lets slip that he’d spoken with his own realtor about selling the house for some time, which the more sentimental brother notes but does not use as the basis for some melodramatic attack. Assayas is above such shortcuts, preferring instead to show these people as actual people.

Indeed, were it not for the advanced camera movements, one might mistake Summer Hours for docufiction. So many of the film’s indelible “little moments” stand out because they feel as if we are being allowed to share them with these characters rather than advance trite character development. When Adrienne mentions her engagement, the brothers and their spouses slowly crack up with amusement, moving from the tittering, nervous inhalations of suppressed giggles to open laughter. We are not told what, exactly, went wrong with Adrienne’s previous engagement, which is right. As it is, the moment is warm and quietly revealing, telling the audience about Adrienne’s impulsiveness and the teasing and distant but loving dynamic between the siblings without wasting time with a story that has no sway on this narrative. By way of comparison, watch the scene early in Attack of the Clones in which Obi-Wan and Anakin make awkward, meaningless chat over a “nest of gundarks” that gives us no insight into its characters and instead clangs like a wrench bouncing off the wall of a canyon.

There must be some point to all of this, however, and the key to the film lies in the manor. Frédéric does not wish to part with his mother’s house because of the memories it contains; the extreme value of the artwork Hélène stored in her home means less to the son than the memories they connote. Thus, the pieces of art and architecture that pass from the family to private collectors and to museums for the tax write-off stand as blatant symbols, but symbols whose meaning speaks to the characters more than the analyst in the theater. It is, after all, silly to place such import on trinkets, but Assayas uses Summer Hours to examine how ordinary, even banal objects, gain importance, be it artistic or personal. Many of the house’s most valuable paintings are the work of one man, Hélène’s uncle. Hélène kept them because of her close, possibly very close relationship with him – this too is left largely unsaid and leads to a character insight rather than a mystery – and through her eyes we see these invaluable originals as naught but sentimental sketches given to a muse as a gift.

Adrienne and Jérémie have little time for such reflection, blithely taking stock of their mother’s effects so that they may sell them and return to life outside of France. These are not bad people, of course, but they have their own set of priorities. They are modern people, connected to the businesses that employ them instead of outdated ideas of settlement and lineage.

It’s a typically American point of view, given our own shallow past and the perception of the nation as a place to start all over and make a new life. In fact, the younger characters of Summer Hours subtly reflect a mindset that has become as much American as French. Adrienne lives in New York with her American fiancé, and the children of the brothers are – like all youngsters, we’re told – infatuated with American fads. Jérémie represents the speed with which people can adapt now to new environments, what with his flippant attitude toward moving halfway around the world for work. He mentions that his daughter will spend a term in San Francisco, the city where Asian immigrants traditionally landed; his daughter not only wants to see the America she’s fascinated with but she’ll arrive more as a Chinese visitor instead of a French one, vaguely reminiscent of the pure-French Arielle referred to as “La Chinoise” in Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen.

That these Americanized characters are chiefly unconcerned with the artifacts being auctioned and donated without a second thought should not, in my humble view, be seen as some sort of attack on the United States (although one could easily make that case, given the rabid anti-French sentiment egged on for nearly all of Bush’s years in office and Hollywood’s ever-strengthening chokehold on genuinely artistic cinema). Rather, Assayas considers how modernization shapes culture: in the age of the Internet, instant worldwide connection erases, at least partially, cultural divisions – is the censorship of Google or Twitter not the modern sign of a repressive regime? When a group of visiting American teenagers walks among the family’s donations in the Musée d’Orsay they look and act no different from the French teens, who would likely be just as bored by the tour. Thus, we have all become one people, which is great, but unification brings with it side-effects: if everyone adopts one civilization and one language, what will become of the art that is tied to a specific culture?

Summer Hours remains a quietly incisive film after multiple viewings precisely because it finds the intersection between these larger concerns and the more personal ruminations on changing generational attitudes toward tradition, even family. Adrienne and Jérémie have drifted away from home, and Hélène’s grandchildren appear even more separated from the passion of the older generation. As such, Summer Hours calls to mind the work of the Japanese legend Ozu Yasujiro, that great cartographer of the generation gap and family relations. Ozu has long been misinterpreted, by those who only watched Tokyo Story and decided to extrapolate an entire career from it, as a director who lamented the passing of the older generation and looked down upon the modernized youth. While Ozu certainly eyed the Western influence on culture and tradition with suspicion, even regret, his attitude toward characters was always nonjudgmental, just as Assayas’ is with these characters. He does not write off Sylvie, Frédéric’s teenage daughter, as just another dead-eyed, shiftless millennial, nor does he condemn the two ex-pat siblings for abandoning their heritage.

Instead, the director gently sculpts these characters, giving them such dimension that the story and themes come naturally from them. Adrienne, who hypocritically disapproves of Jérémie working for a company that exploits cheap labor while wearing a pair of Converse sneakers made the same way, would in any other film be the flighty, self-absorbed bitch denied her chance to prove any hint of humanity until a hackneyed breakthrough near the end. Here, however, she displays three-dimesionality from the start, setting aside her modern conventions to marvel over an old, silver platter, justifying her admiration of it to her mother by claiming that beauty is beauty, regardless of age. Later, as appraisers storm the house to attach price tags to everything, Adrienne discovers the platter and can barely contain her pure joy, and we see that even a whimsical nomad like her can assign meaning and memories to objects just as strongly as the more sedentary and traditional.

Perhaps the influence of such artistic keepsakes can be traced to the participation of the Musée d’Orsay, which not only loaned the art but funded the film as part of their recent focus on making films as a way of expanding the museum’s artistic boundaries. But the relation between objects and assigned importance has purportedly been a recurring theme in Assayas’ corpus, of which I must shamefully admit ignorance. The director certainly uses this partnership to its fullest potential, and the artwork he places in Hélène’s estate is as priceless as it is perfectly suited for the film. Apart from the use of Jean Berthier as the matriarch’s famous uncle, Assayas particularly highlights a few works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Odilon Redon. Corot, one of the great landscapists, operated in the nebulous territory between the Neo-Classical movement and Impressionism. Classical art strove to depict subjects as they were, while Impressionism captures subjects as they strike the artist. Summer Hours, with its honest depiction of character and its analytical probing of inanimate objects until they take on a resonance, could be said to walk the line between the two as well. One should also remember that Impressionism grew, in part, out of the redundancy of realistic art in the face of the invention of the camera, a technological development that reshaped art as a response. Redon, on the other hand, was a Symbolist painter, though the designation suggests a more didactic approach than the artist really took. “My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined,” he once said. “They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” Summer Hours contains plenty of symbolic imagery to chew on, but Assayas’ structuring of the material places it in a more contemplative context than one that stresses its message over all else.

But I fear that I’m losing control of this review now. Discussing Summer Hours can be a tricky proposition, as so much of its power and insight is directly tied to what’s on-screen. It is easy, for instance, to point out an arcing track-pan of a shot of a desk in the Musée d’Orsay after being moved from Hélène’s house and say that it symbolizes the ephemeral nature of the transformation of an object from something of deep personal significance to a sealed-off artifact to be disinterestedly ignored by schoolkids. In that one shot is the crux of the argument that modernization desensitizes and demystifies us all, that email and planned obsolescence of so many of our goods will rob everything of its spiritual value, that nothing will even last long enough to gain significance.

Far more difficult, however, is putting into words just why that shot can evoke a deep sadness and a sense of loss, even in this Mac-loving, nature-averse writer. Or why pointing out the scene’s symbolism is less fulfilling and thought-provoking than simply recalling a moment early in the film when Frédéric tours his kids through the house and recounts the history of the paintings and tries to sell the children on it just like the tour guide trying in vain to hook the teens in the museum. “It’s from another era,” the kids flatly tell their deflated father. This scene is echoed once more at the end, when Sylvie invites her friends to the gutted manor to give it a sort of farewell party, where the kids kick around footballs and blare music as if living out their fantasy vision of a museum field trip.

Yet it is this coda that cements Summer Hours as more than just the patient but cranky rambling of a ranting old man. As the teens smoke and drink and generally font les quatre cents coups, Sylvie and her boyfriend move to the outskirts of the garden, where the previously bored young woman quietly reflects upon her own memories in the house and wonders whether she will lose something she cannot get back when the house changes hands. “It’s my youth,” Hélène told Frédéric when she surprisingly surrendered her family’s hold upon the artwork stored in her house, and the meaning of that dismissal becomes clear only at the end. As he has delved into this topic before, the director by now understands that our own attachments to trinkets and keepsakes cannot be transferred to another. Hélène understands this too, so she releases her family from the burden of hanging on to objects that can never mean as much to them as they do to her, and in the process she frees them to build their own collections, whatever they may be. Thus, a relatively plot-less film ends with the director releasing his final major character, setting Sylvie off to make her own story, one that will make an interesting update of this one in a few decades.

When I first saw Summer Hours in a cozy arthouse in Columbus, Ga., I knew instantly that I’d seen one of the most charming, insightful and meditative films in recent years. Repeat viewings only enhance the feelings of regret, acceptance and hope as the familiarity these characters already exhibit with each other becomes ours as well. Open without being obvious, thematically occupied without losing its human element, elusive in a manner that makes everything inescapably clear, Summer Hours has a piercing vision but a soft touch. So very little actually happens, and yet every shot reveals something – an interaction, a reflection, a thematic advancement – and gives the feeling of immediacy despite its lax pace. At various stages in the development of this review, I pointed to one aspect of the film as being the most arresting, yet as I continued to write I would erase the last assertion to spotlight something else as the film’s true triumph. After watching it again, I think I know at last what truly makes the film so memorable: every time this film is set to make the usual cinematic choice, it doesn’t. What does it say about the state of cinema, then, that each of these diversions feels truer to life than anything playing at the megaplex?

Summer Hours is available now on DVD and Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection. The Blu-Ray boasts excellent color levels (particularly the greens of the estate’s gardens) and a nuanced DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Included in both versions are: an informative half-hour interview with Olivier Assayas, who describes how the project came to be and how his interests and those of the Musée d’Orsay aligned; a half-hour making-of documentary; and another, hour-long doc titled Inventory, which details the art loaned to Assayas for the film and the way it is used. Also included is a booklet featuring an essay by British critic and editor-at-large of Film Comment, Kent Jones, who pens for Assayas’ first entry in the Criterion Collection an introductory (and personal) overview of the director’s career in addition to his appraisal of this film. Praising Criterion’s Blu-Ray treatments is becoming an increasingly redundant gesture, but it’s fascinating to see how a simple, quiet film like this can be just as gorgeous as the company’s restoration of Days of Heaven and its flawless presentation of the digitally shot Che. The set comes almost as highly recommended as the film itself.

–Jake Cole

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