Written and Directed by Olivier Assayas
Summer Hours opens with a horde of children of all ages running through a lush yard. It is summer and everything is bright and they are on a treasure hunt of their own making. We are at a family reunion and the children are all cousins, visiting their grandmother’s house with their parents for Grandma Helene’s 75th birthday. It is in this way we are introduced to the Manly family and their intricate ties to this home which once belonged to famous French painter Paul Berthier. Helene is intensely dedicated to Paul’s life work and legacy, but realizing her own mortality, requests the collection of 19th Century art pieces that litter the home be sold and donated to museums upon her passing. What follows is a story which deals with concepts of nostalgia, family dynamics, and the difficulty of grown children becoming adults when their parents’ generation is finally gone.
The film mostly revolves around Helene’s children Frederic (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) as they juggle their lives controlled by being parents and careers that take them in different directions. Each has an extremely well defined role in the family (something that can also be said to another extent about the lesser characters in the film) and is portrayed almost flawlessly in their own skin. Frederic, as the oldest, has the most memories of Paul Berthier before his death and as such is closest to their mother. As the only sibling living in France, he is also given the major burden of dealing with the remnants of the family estate. Adrienne is the middle child, the only girl, and seems to be the most creative of the three. She is also the only unmarried and childless of the three. Jeremie, as the youngest, is the most hands-off and most willing to start anew in a completely foreign land. He, as opposed to his brother, is more focused on being a good father himself rather than dwell on notions of the family as it was in the past.
The fact that each character is dealing with their lives escalating as the past disappears is reflective of a theme in the film about cyclical generations. Some people focus only on what came before them, others only on what is yet to come. You can dwell on the way a group of people sat around a table in 1950 and compare it to today, or realize that for them in that moment they were probably just living their lives in the present. This is a significant part of what makes the film so great. We get both sides of the coin; those that have memories and those that are making new ones. Some people are born “old” and some are eternally “young”.
Many of the film’s subtleties are communicated in performance, but even more about how each character is feeling at a given moment we receive through the camera’s placement. Such expert camera placement is rare in film, where it truly fulfills its role as putting the audience in the drivers’ seat of what is taking place on screen. If the dynamic shifts from a communal jest to an uncomfortable moment for one person, the camera is right there telling us the same. This goes a long way toward making great acting excellent. Without any Point-of-view shots, we still get intimately inside the head of our protagonists.
Made in collaboration with and produced by The Musee D’Orsay in Paris, there are real works of art in the home, which play a key role in the film. It is through these objects that the home comes alive as the central figure in the film. As the home is dealt with and the art pieces end up in new places we are left to ponder whether they are living on as they were meant to or whether they are dead relics of a bygone era. The same can be said of people too. The more I think about the film, the better it gets in my mind. And I surmise that as I get older and my generation deals with the similar issues to what the the three children are dealing with here, the film will continue to age with grace.
***** Five Stars – Definitely see this film
Summer Hours is now on DVD internationally; a US release date is not yet determined.
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