Sole Criterion: Summer Hours
By Brett Ballard-Beach
May 10, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Released in France in 2008 and the United States in 2009, and finally seen by me late last year and again this past weekend, Summer Hours is - at the risk of adorning it off the bat with such praise - perhaps my most treasured film of the last several years. It carries a quiet power, not necessarily building towards its exquisite climax, but ebbing and flowing, accumulating its resonance through a small series of scenes, until it arrives at a concluding eight minutes that are so simple, yet blessed with joy and sadness and a deep empathy (from a filmmaker towards his characters and a teenage girl towards her family) that I find myself tearing up simply sketching the ambient mood of the proceedings.
I realize that the preceding paragraph, coupled with the fact that a lot of other critics felt the same (it topped Indiewire’s poll of the best films of 2009, beating out the second place tie of The Hurt Locker and A Serious Man) may make it sound like cinematic broccoli: good for you, if not necessarily enjoyable. The most remarkable achievement of the film - written and directed by Olivier Assayas - then, is that it deals with weighty themes (mortality, memories, family) and academic considerations (the value and status of real estate, or art, or any other of the “objects” in our life) without become weighted down. Running just over 100 minutes, it floats through the lives of its characters with something of a fly on the wall approach.
Many of the most important (re: dramatic) plot points occur off screen and there is a singularly low-key approach as well to the acting. No one is tasked with a scene of great revelation or drawn into tangents of overheated melodrama. It is, it would seem, a film that shrugs off any need to beat its chest, or call attention to itself. In that sense of stillness - and its title ironically notwithstanding - Summer Hours contains something of an autumnal quality.
I have only seen about one quarter of Assayas’ varied feature film output from the last 15 years, and yet I can see a trend or two underlying the disparate genres he has mined. 1996’s Irma Vep was a mostly comic, occasionally sinister valentine to silent cinema serials in general and actress Maggie Cheung in particular. 2003’s deranged and spooky thriller/black comedy Demonlover was propelled by a Sonic Youth score and descended so far down into the rabbit hole that even after several viewings I still remain unsure if the film’s protagonist - a corporate shark magnificently embodied by Connie Nielsen - really did find herself an anonymous sex slave on a website secretly operated by a company set to merge with hers. 2007’s Boarding Gate was a globe-hopping action film with a singular one-on-one set piece of kink/combat between assassin/corporate spy Asia Argento and her boss/lover Michael Madsen.
And yet, even those sparse descriptions capture a little of what lies just beneath the surface of the plots: a consideration of the global dynamics that connect our business dealings and - whether we choose to admit it or not - our personal relationships as well. I haven’t yet seen Assayas’ most recent epic production, his five-hour plus miniseries Carlos, about the infamous terrorist known as The Jackal, but what I know of the plot, and the fact alone that 13 different languages are spoken suggests that the theme is explored there as well.
Summer Hours spends a fair portion of its running time - nearly the first 30 minutes - at a family gathering where Assayas throws the audience in, Altman-like, by refusing to spell out in drab dialogue who is related to who and how. They talk instead like a family, more functional than some, a little more distant than others, who only get a chance to be together once, maybe twice, a year. We meet matriarch Helene, celebrating her 75th birthday, her three children - Adrienne, Frederic, and Jeremie - and assorted significant others, grandchildren, and household domestics.
As the film starts, the children are on a treasure hunt, looking for a secret item of significant value. In a way, this foreshadows the discussions the siblings will have as they are forced to reckon with the values of the various artifacts, art objects, and potential museum pieces that adorn their childhood home, and weigh their worth as family items and as a legacy versus what they might fetch on the market. Helene has been the keeper of the memory and legacy of her favorite uncle, an artist of some acclaim. But now in the twilight of her life, with her work achieved to her satisfaction, she is looking to the time when she is no longer here.
In an early scene both brusque and discomfiting she has Frederic accompany her through the house as she rattles off the various items of worth (a plaster cast, some panels, her uncle’s sketchbooks, a final drawing, a pair of paintings) and what she expects him to do with them. Assayas mines the universal unease of any adult child talking with a parent about what will happen he or she is no longer there. But he adds a twist in that it is Frederic who (wrongly) assumes that his mother means for him and his brother and sister to maintain everything as it is, to pass on to their children Helene has no such illusions. In a statement that might serve as the film’s unconventional thesis, she lays out in precise terms exactly how she sees her legacy in perspective of the larger picture: “They’re young. It’s their childhood they love. But when they’re older, they’ll have better things to do than deal with bric-a-brac from another era.” Keep that thought in mind. I will return to it shortly.
Assayas has said that Summer Hours, which began as a short film, a commission for the Musee d’Orsay, is meant to be more about the progress of the objects owned by Helene, from private (home) to public (museum display). Being the creator of the film, he is allowed his opinion, but I tend to disregard such statements from him as much as I do, say, Peter Greenaway’s constant carping about actors being a necessary evil, and wishing he could do away with them entirely. If Assayas’ intent is as stated, he could have made the film significantly more clinical and less human, cast less interesting actors for the audience to (not) follow, and veered off toward a more documentary-like or non-fiction approach. But he didn’t.
He has opted to forsake overt sentimentality (a good thing in my eyes) and has chosen to leave more than a few of his plot points unresolved, giving us sketches of some of the characters, which more than suffice to create a connection between them and the viewer.
As one example, we follow the daily life of Frederic (an economics professor and author) in more depth than his other siblings by virtue of the fact that he is the only one who resides in France, where the film takes place. Adrienne lives in the United States (in New York as a graphic designer) and Jeremie is an executive for shoe manufacturer Puma, living abroad in Beijing with his family for the indefinite future. When Adrienne announces to her siblings her plan to marry her longtime boyfriend (who we have met ever so briefly but crucially in a scene just prior), it is a moment marked by good cheer and acceptance, but it isn’t something the film has any plan (or need) to follow up on.
Another example is in the penultimate scene, with the items in question finally restored and on display. A museum guide efficiently but hurriedly pushes her charges on through. (Assayas pointedly follows one distracted chap who wanders off to answer his cell phone, discussing his plans for later with his girlfriend, and then hurrying to catch up as his group exits out of frame.) Frederic and his wife make their way through the exhibits at a more measured pace, and in discussing the experience afterwards, over coffee, it becomes more than apparent through their conversation and their attitudes that they have now separated. What led to this? There is no animosity (indeed, the final fadeout on them is of the pair laughing uproariously at an inside joke), but there is mystery. Each of the dozen or so distinct chapters of the story ends on such a fadeout, thus providing continuity, even as they acknowledge the intentional narrative gaps.
Assayas’ frequent cinematographer Eric Gautier obtains a magnificent balance in shooting the interiors and exteriors of the film, finding great natural light in the idyllic meadows and fields that surround the family home, as well as inside the dwelling itself. This is not a film of gloomy shadows and dark chambers. This is mirrored as well in the score that finds both nostalgic tones and a more forward-looking modernity.
Among his actors, Assayas gets the biggest surprise out of Juliette Binoche, almost unrecognizable in certain scenes underneath blonde highlights and a manner best expressed by an almost omnipresent slouch. Edith Scob as Helene has perhaps the trickiest role as she has to cast the long shadow (and some light) after she disappears from the film, so that we can see the effect Helene has on her children after she dies. Helene seems to hide a deeper melancholy underneath a surface eccentricity that’s far easier for her family to relate to and Scob is able to suggest the loggerheads of those two opposing emotional states.
Which brings us to the quote at the top uttered by Frederic’s daughter, Sylvie. It is almost the final line of the film and it calls into question the wisdom of Helene’s thoughts earlier on the younger generation’s connection to items from their family’s past. Sylvie and her brother are hosting a weekend party for all their friends as a final goodbye to the house and Gautier’s camera functions almost as a party guest for the first part of this sequence following Sylvie and a friend through the rooms in a long tracking shot, simply observing youth at play, setting up music (several genres are chosen and rejected), smoking pot, hanging out.
Sylvie goes off to find her boyfriend in the woods and it is in her brief conversation with him that the film becomes transcendentally beautiful and sad. In Sylvie’s mature acceptance of death and endings, Assayas finds a way to plant a seed for new beginnings. It is wholly appropriate that the film fades out on them hopping the fence and taking off through a field so they can stay hidden from their friends. As the camera gently rises and pulls back, Incredible Sting Band’s “Little Cloud” plays on the soundtrack, lead singer Robin Williamson musing:
“And as my cloud pulled out of view/There came falling down a gentle shower of rain/Happy rain come falling down . . .And every drop as it fell, it smiled.”