SUMMER HOURS
The last Olivier Assayas film that I saw, and reviewed last spring was The Boarding Gate a kind of oddball thriller that zipped back and forth between France and Hong Kong. This time out it's an entirely different subject, mood and location. Summer Hours seems to be mostly about the crippling or paralysis that creeps in and overtakes one or even a whole society's spirit, when locked in the past.
In this particular case, it's a suffocating relationship to works of art, a French specialty given the centrality of fine art to France's sense of itself, of what it means to be French. The framework is a dysfunctional and increasingly un-French family, the results of globalization and mobility. If industrialization broke up the small agragrian family unit dispersing it across a country, globalization of industry spreads us out even further. The family here is anchored, but barely, by Héléne (Edith Scob), a delicately French matriarch who lives in a museum of a country house. She has devoted her life to raising her children and grandchildren, but perhaps moreso to preserving the art and memory of her famous uncle, a great fine art painter as well as a collector.
The three children have differing points of view on what to do with the house and all the stuff of legend. Adrienne (a very frumpy Juliette Binoche) has decamped to New York, where she has chosen to be an artist in a very different, more commercial way. She recognizes the value of the place and things but very clearly recognizes it all as a the trap which she long ago released herself from. Her younger brother, Jérémie is the pragmatic businessperson who is heading to the new capitalist frontier, China. It is only the Frédéric, the academic, who clings to his mother's romantic attachment, although even he sees the havoc it has wrought.
For a francophile like myself who most definitely romanticizes certain stereotypical characteristics of France, that are grounded in the past, I see the gauntlet that Assayas has thrown down. Instead of traffiking in the beautiful French country house loaded with masterpieces, we watch it literally being disassembled and sold. We watch the cold calculation of museum negotiations -- what they'll take versus what they won't to relieve the inheritance taxes. It's certainly a cold dose of "you can't take it with you" realism.
But it doesn't quite satisfy: and of course that's the point if one was expecting some sort of exotically French film. I applaud Assayas for asking us to look at the real, as opposed to the tourist version of France. At the same time, the pacing, the narrative, doesn't quite deliver on it's provocative idea. There is one favorite granddaughter who is meant to represent the future, hope, I'm not quite sure. I felt the last scenes with her generation using the great house for a last teenage blowout pointless other than to allow the camera to linger on the nubile. Now isn't that a French cliche we can do without. In the end, it's all just a bit too dull, the film that is, and lover of France that I still am, despite the proliferation of Starbucks in Paris, I'm not ready to declare it so. Then again, I don't live there.
Summer Hours open in Los Angeles, May 29, 2009.
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas; produced by Marin Karmitz, Nathanaël Karmitz, and Charles Gillibert; cinematography by Eric Gautier; edited by Luc Barnier. Released by IFC films. Running time: 102 minutes.
With: Juliette Binoche (Adrienne), Charles Berling (Frédéric), Jérémie Renier (Jérémie), Edith Scob (Hélène), Dominque Reymond (Lisa) and Valérie Bonneton (Angela).
