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“My grandmother’s gone. The house has been sold.”

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.

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