"i took something ordinary. what would i do with something valuable?"
Glenn Kenny hits the nail on the head: Olivier Assayas' beautiful film Summer Hours strikes the perfect chord between ideas and characters. It manages to be both a meditation on the nature of what we call Art versus an art that is an active part of our lives, the nature of craft, beauty and artifact, and also on time, family and memory in a rapidly changing globalizing world. From the opening credits which slowly reveal the spectral image of a house --as in a dream or a fleeting memory-- I was entranced by its simple beauty. Although i missed this film last decade (the film was shot in 2007 and released in 2009), i'm going to retro-actively add it to my 'best of list'.
Through the first 30 minutes you are caught up in life and living. Children are playing, a summer lunch is being prepared, family is gathered for the 75th birthday of Helene Berthier ( Edith Scob). The cinematography of Eric Gautier (who has made a fine name for himself over the last decade: The Motorcycle Diaries, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Private Fears in Public Places, Into the Wild, A Christmas Tale and Wild Grass) is flawless --you believe every frame. The camera is active, capturing a house teeming with life, without a hint of this 'false verité' jerkiness so prevalent in every damn television show and movie i seem to see today. We soon find out that Helene's children Frederic (Charles Berling) and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) don't visit often. Jeremie lives with his wife and children in China working for Puma and Adrienne lives in New York as a designer. Only Frederic and his family live in France. Taking a moment away from the family gathering, Helene reminds Frederic to sell her 'prized' possessions when she dies but Frederic resists ... he loves the house and the memories that come with it.
But, this film is not about 'inheritance', which really functions as a macguffin that facilitates the elegant meditation on how we infuse meaning into objects of beauty through living (and all of the beautiful and messy complexities of life, including loss and memeory) versus the 'caged' beauty of Art objects in museums. Helene's house is well lived in. Unique pieces of 'Art Nuveau' furniture are functional elements of her life --a toy airplane in a Venetian armoire by Josef Hoffman, a one of a kind desk by Louis Majorelle that the Musée d'Orsay has asked for in the past covered with papers, a broken Degas plaster wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and stuffed into another rare Majorelle curio cabinet. Although they enrich her life and her home with the memories of how they were acquired and the life lived with them they are also functional tools. Helene tells Frederic to sell the prize possession and split them between his siblings, but to Frederic the objects (and the home) are fetishes of memory --far more important to him than the money.
Time pulses through the movie. À la the recently deceased Éric Rohmer, conversations give way to passages of time which gives way to conversations which gives way to passages of time and images of time and memory (without falling into a forced sentimentality). Sound is used, with exceptional beauty and heartbreaking awkwardness, as a tool to facilitate the mediation on time, memory and the everyday. There is a moment just after Helene's death when her daughter (Juliette Binoche) comes out of the public viewing and sits in a chair next to her American boyfriend. We experience her pain without words. We can only recall the sounds of life and family from the beginning of the movie as we watch her in silence. But as the boyfriend moves closer to console her there is an awkward screech of the chair on the tile floor which breaks the trance --and becomes part of it as well.
The children are forced to decide the fate of the house and the belongings when Helene passes away. The viewer is then forced to begin to consider the 'value' and 'meaning' we place on all that we know about Helene's possessions. Our own relationship to the objects begin to change as appraisers are brought in and the house is packed up.
The story then leaves us with the next generation, Helene's eldest granddaughter, who --like a sequence out of Bergman's Wild Strawberries-- throws a party in the husk of this memory and left to ponder its loss.
This is a fine example of cinema that gets 'in' you by drawing you into its life world. It's a painful reminder of the cost of modern existence: presentness to people and place sacrificed to speed and money. And like Helene's home, these are the textures of everyday life that may one day end up caged in a museum only for some fool to rush by ...
Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let's go together.
Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 186–190
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