a SIFF 2009 review
Elegant Summer Hours a Timeless Journey
After their mother Hélène (Edith Scob), her three children must decide what to do with her massive estate, much of it filled to the brim with their world famous uncle’s massive 19th Century art collection. Oldest son, Parisian economist and university professor Frédéric (Charles Berling), thinks everything should remain as it is, a collection their entire family can continue to take pride in and pass down to their own children in the future. But Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), a successful New York designer, and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), a corporate businessman stationed in China, disagree, their far-flung lives leading them to believe the only rational thing the three can do is sell everything off or donate it to Paris’ Musée d’Orsay.
Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling in IFC Films' Summer Hours
Together, this trio must confront their modern lives and figure out how it impacts their familial desires. Questions of who they are now, what they want from life and whether or not these antiquities have any value (other than financial) ram one into the other, their collective decisions having an everlasting impact none of them clearly comprehend.
Acclaimed writer/director Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate) returns to his intimate, interpersonal roots with the beautiful, multilayered Summer Hours. Exploring the global lives of a modern French family, he shows how childhood fantasy gives way to adult responsibility and how a now internationalized world erases many of the common threads of ancestry which could potentially bind them all together.
In many ways this is as fascinating, and as devastating, a drama as any I’m likely to see this year. Played out like a series of vignette snapshots, the filmmaker doesn’t linger on any one moment or any single narrative. Instead he bobs in and out of it, and much like Wong Kar Wai (2046, Chunking Express) he tends to allow his camera to sit like a fly on the wall observing the interpersonal conversations without adding any outside commentary.
Unfortunately, at times this does tend to have a distancing effect relegating some of the more heated arguments a bit devoid of emotional impact. As much as I wanted to feel and understand Adrienne and Jérémie’s thought processes, I kept feeling like Assayas was so intent on keeping his documentary-like approach that their dual hesitancy to vocalize their desires fell a tiny bit mute. I also think, at times, there is too much distance between one look-in and the next, trying to decipher the missing pieces a bit more of a bother than it is really rather worth.
Yet these prove to be minor problems at best, and thanks to the stirring central thread the director does a masterful job of showing just how disenfranchised and disconnected our multinational world had become. Frédéric’s continued malaise as to just what it is his siblings are forcing him to do is absolutely palpable, a walk through the Musée d’Orsay with his wife a quietly effective emotional maelstrom that had me in absolute tears.
The film is beautifully photographed by Eric Gautier (Into the Wild) and edited by frequent Assayas collaborator Luc Barnier (Clean), the pair achieving a picturesque elegance that mirrors the impressionistic artwork and paintings the film so lovingly showcases. It is also wonderfully acted by everyone, Berling a particular standout bringing a heart-heavy longing and despair to his character that touched me to my very core.
I admit I’ve come to expect a lot from this particular director after watching his 1996 marvel Irma Vep so I might be downgrading some of the elements here a bit more than they probably deserve. Thankfully, I’m so high on the rest of the film and so captivated by much of the filmmaker’s writing that those reservations really amount to nothing more than a slightly noticeable hill of beans.
There is an exquisite, almost longing ebullience to Summer Hours that lasted long after I left the movie theater, many of its themes whipping through my head like a whirlwind. I found that I didn’t want the film to end, that I wanted to see what kind of adults the siblings’ children would grow to become, to discover what sort of world it would be they would inherit. While not a masterpiece Assayas has still achieved something modestly miraculous, the finished product a memorable journey I can’t wait to embark on again.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
Additional Links
- 2009 SIFF Blog Coming May 21st!
- Summer Hours Theatrical Trailer
