Dans la famille

Throughout his career, festival favorite Olivier Assayas has
alternated between meta-pop, sometimes lurid, neo-new wave genre flicks
and their antithesis — genteel, talk-driven ensemble dramas. With
Summer Hours, the 54-year-old director brings it all back
home, staging a tactical retreat from the Edge City hookers, junkies
and media sharks of Boarding Gate, Clean and
Demonlover to the heart of a bourgeois French family.

Summer Hours opens with a gaggle of first cousins romping
around the verdant grounds of the rustic estate, in the midst of life
somewhere north of Paris, where their parents grew up. That the kids
are on a treasure hunt sets the metaphoric table for much that will
follow. The occasion is a 75th-birthday celebration for their still
formidably chic grandmother, Hélène (Edith Scob).
Assayas, who has always excelled at choreographing a fete, uses the
first half hour to introduce Hélène’s three grown
children, as well as her custodial devotion to the estate, with its
casually displayed objets d’art, and to the work of her late uncle, a
celebrated painter.

For all the local color, there’s a global backbeat. The youngest
child (Dardenne favorite Jérémie Renier) runs a Puma
factory in China; his sister (Juliette Binoche, here, a blond) is a New
York designer; and, though living in Paris, the eldest son,
Frédéric (Assayas alter ego Charles Berling), is an
economist. Lunch devoured, everyone rushes off, leaving
Hélène to sit in the dark as her sturdy old housekeeper
bustles around. She’s alone — and she does die, off-screen,
perhaps a year later. It’s again in the midst of life, as
Frédéric does a radio interview.

Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost
Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent’s death and the dissolving bond
between the surviving children. It’s also an essay on the nature of
sentimental and real value — as well as the need to protect
French culture in a homogenizing world. The siblings have conflicting
positions on how to handle the estate: Frédéric’s heart
is not only re-broken in these transactions, but also toughened —
as the eldest child, and the only local, he has to deal with the
practicalities of liquidating the past. Late in the movie, the
economist and his wife gaze at Hélène’s petite deco desk,
now on display at the Musée d’Orsay (“Strange seeing it here
— I don’t know what to think”), even as Hélène’s
faithful servant is lovingly deposited in a little retirement tomb
somewhere in the south. A beautifully staged coda, paralleling the
opening scene, gives the empty estate an appropriately bittersweet
send-off.

Summer Hours had its U.S. premiere at last year’s New York
Film Festival, where its touching meditation on death, absence and loss
was somewhat overshadowed by Arnaud Desplechin’s showier family drama
A Christmas Tale. The members of the Assayas clan are certainly
less freakish than Desplechin’s eccentrics and, thanks to the intensely
relational performances that Assayas orchestrates, they make a vivid
and sympathetic group — however fortunate, flush and French.
Assayas frames Berling and Renier to heighten their physical
resemblance; Binoche is uncannily convincing, both in looks and
temperament, as Scob’s daughter. Like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2007 Flight
of the Red Balloon, which also starred Binoche, Summer Hours had its origin as a commission celebrating the Musée d’Orsay’s
20th anniversary — hence the museum sequences, and the artworks
themselves. I don’t know whether casting Binoche was part of the deal,
but her focused, mercurial performances in both movies suggest that
she, too, is a national treasure.

Indeed, Assayas has his own preservationist agenda. Praised as
“classically French” by the hardboiled hipsters of Paris’s culture
weekly Les Inrockuptibles — not to mention being a perfect
example of the middle-budget, heritage-minded film du milieu — Summer Hours exemplifies, even as it ponders, France in
the age of unstoppable globalization.