Oliver Assayas’s exquisite new film, Summer Hours, is a sort of fable about heritage and generations, a longing look backward that has both caution and affection for the future. In a series of extended vignettes of a family wrestling with the implications of their inheritance, Assayas powerfully yet subtly explores the things that linger in the wake of family loss: memories, empty homes, inherited objects – artifacts of our individual, familial, and societal histories.
The film opens at the birthday party of Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob), a lively and feisty matriarch surrounded by her far-flung children Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) and their families. Perhaps sensing her mortality, Hélène beckons Frédéric into the country house she inherited from her uncle Paul, a famous painter, and begins to point out the various furnishings and pieces bequeathed on the family by notable friends. Frédéric is uncomfortable; Hélène insists.
The family must eventually run off to catch planes and trains to their homes in China, New York, and Paris, leaving Hélène alone with the promise to see her again at a retrospective of Paul’s work in San Francisco. When we next see them, they have gathered for Hélène’s funeral, and for the rest of the film they congenially but somewhat uncomfortably must deal with the fallout of their inheritance – where the artifacts belong (with collectors, the family, or the Musée d’Orsay), how best to preserve Paul’s memory, and whether to keep or sell the house.
I will break from the reviewer’s omniscience to say that I find it incredibly difficult to review films like Summer Hours. They are so lovely, and so deep in their implications, that to purport to have figured it out spoils the spell – like writing about the loveliest transcendent painting.
And so I will say little about the film and its extraordinary cast – but I urge you to see it. Though eminently French in his sensibility, Assayas, along with cinematographer Eric Gautier, nonetheless channels an Altman-eque quality, with the camera drifting in and out of rooms as it follows people around. The driving force of the story – Hélène’s passing – happens between the first and second scenes, and so it provides the impetus for the tale, but it’s really more of a character piece, illuminating the differences between generations and personalities. (I couldn’t help feel as if I’d understand the film even better if I were French.)
At the heart here is a question of passing traditions – what should remain sacred, what of a private life should become part of the public memory, and the inevitable sadness that comes when traditions memories can no longer remain static.
In the final scene of the film, the children of the family – Hélène’s grandchildren – are having one last party with their friends at the country home. They run rampant around the place and its grounds, playing games and music, drinking beer and flirting. The scene easily could be taken to be an aging filmmaker’s dig at the younger generation, which has no reverence for the sacredness of the past.
But as the granddaughter reminisced about the house to her boyfriend, I realized that Assayas is more complex than that. The younger generation is repurposing old tradition to make their own memories that they will treasure and tell to their children – or perhaps take them to the grave. The passing of the old is sad, but a necessary and true part of life. In Summer Hours Assayas both mourns and celebrates change.