film, eyeballs, brain

Olivier Assayas’ exquisite new film, Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) began, at least for myself, almost frighteningly like a generic Miramax French family drama: a sun-dappled lawn, a picture-perfect al fresco meal, children playing gaily on the grounds, and a cast, cardigans draped on shoulders, looking like they just finished a fashion shoot. (The most well-known actress here is the lone daughter Adrienne, who is played by Juliette Binoche — her hair still dyed blonde, I like to imagine, from The Flight of the Red Balloon.) The family has gathered together at their summer house for the 75th birthday of their mother Hélène, played by the elegant Edith Scob.* But such a happy milestone nonetheless provokes thoughts of mortality, and so she confides in her eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling, something of an Assayas regular now) about the disposition of the summer house and its contents after her death.

The estate itself is something of a shrine to the memory of Hélène‘s uncle, a painter named Paul Berthier, and in the prologue, she leads Frédéric and the movie audience on a tour of the house’s many treasures: a Louis Majorelle desk (seen here, significantly, covered with piles of papers – being used for work, in other words), two Corot canvases, a Marie Bracquemond vase used daily to hold fresh flowers. It’s a touching sequence, and her son naturally protests all her morbid thoughts – it’s also a conversation I have just about every year with my own mother – but it isn’t just the impending sense of loss and leave-taking that Assayas tenderly captures here.

The subdued domestic chamber piece that is Summer Hours may seem like an unusual turn for Assayas, whose most well-known movies — the fantastic Irma Vep, from 1996 (one of my favorites from that decade), or the disappointing Boarding Gate (2007), which at least featured Asia Argento mostly in her skivvies — were Godardian messings-about with genre. But Summer Hours isn’t just a domestic drama (“domestic” in the sense of the “local”); in fact, it resonates with Assayas’ previous explorations of globalization.

Even the restless globetrotting of his other movies is echoed here, as Adrienne, a designer for Takashimaya, is about to move to New York, and the youngest brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) oversees Puma’s factories in Shanghai. Their summer hours, it is clear, will not be spent in France anymore. Only Frédéric will be left living in Paris, and he is in fact shown more frequently in the film to inhabit the house and its grounds: picking flowers in the woods, recalling specific memories in rooms. (Eric Gautier’s camera drifts slowly through the house and on its objects, as if to fix their presence before they disappear.)

Assayas is interested here in the social life of objects, the way in which we invest them with meaning, and their afterlives once these objects have passed from our hands (or vice-versa). When the inevitable happens – not a spoiler, I promise – the film chronicles the slow, unremarked process when the previously priceless is transformed, willingly or unwillingly, into a commodity. He raises questions about art and function, the relation between value and memory, the transformation of private family heirlooms into public artifacts of the national patrimony. It’s a rich, challenging, and rewarding scenario, tucked into this simple and intimate “domestic” drama.

Once the fate of the summer house itself has to be decided by the siblings, the answer is perhaps tragically inevitable as well. But it brings to the fore Assayas’ interests in globalization and a general transnational uprooting, raising even more implied questions: how Frédéric’s siblings (and their own children) “remain” French outside the motherland’s boundaries, what happens when people and things are removed from their original contexts, and, ultimately, what constitutes so-called national cultures.

Towards the end of the film, Frédéric looks at one of the vases in a different context, and remarks that — I can’t recall the exact quotation – it should instead have flowers in it, on a table. But Assayas isn’t content to simply compare the sanctity of the museum piece (and the national history which “inheres” in it) with its sentimental, personal value and ask the audience to judge. His Irma Vep was after all (among other things) about the seemingly quixotic attempt to remake Feuillade’s classic 1915 serial Les Vampires with an actress from Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung) in the lead. (It’s certainly deliberate that a song by The Incredible String Band plays at the end of Summer Hours; the music they created were a strange and wonderful marriage of recuperated and rejiggered Celtic folk melodies and psychedelia’s fascination with the East.)

The process of letting go is clearly bittersweet for Frédéric – and I think a lesser director would have capitalized on this aspect of mourning – but the film treats this with quiet understatement. And Assayas ends Summer Hours with a lovely sequence that recapitulates the prologue: a brilliant, raucous reclamation of the emptying house, with young lusty life passing joyously through its dusty hallways once more.

*Digressive observation here: doesn’t the young Binoche oddly resemble Scob in Eyes without a Face, especially with her mask on?

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