'Summer Hours': A four-star weekend in the country
A French family discovers the value of their heirlooms
Published: July 17, 2009, 9:41 am
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Corot landscapes lend austere beauty to the walls in the hall. In another, livelier room, there are screens that were painted by Odilon Redon. A Hoffmann armoire stands on the floor and a sculpture by Degas sat on a table — until, that is, a couple of roughhousing sons knocked it over and broke it. Now it rests in a plastic bag in storage.
To put it mildly, the summer house of the Blethier family, just outside Paris, is loaded with artifacts we’d routinely call “museum quality” without stopping for a second to think about what that phrase — and all its implications — might mean.
Olivier Assayas’ “Summer Hours” is about life and culture before we warehouse the latter in museums to be ogled, ignored, appraised and kept safe and inert. It’s a sublime movie, utterly unlike anything we’ve seen in months — or are likely to see for many more months.
When the house’s family — three grown children, their spouses, significant others and kids — gathers for the family matriarch’s 75th birthday celebration in that summer house, she is adamant about doing what passing generations so often do: acquainting the family with the value of all that she’ll leave behind.
This is no easy weekend gathering in the country to take for granted. One of her sons lives with his wife and their kids in China. Her only daughter is a designer in New York City. Only her eldest son, an economics professor, lives with his wife and two teenage kids in Paris, about 40 minutes away.
So when the mother dies, the Blethier family is overtaken by the small domestic crises that eventually overtake every family, without exception: how do current generations value — or merely dispose of — the treasures and artifacts of a previous generation? In this case, that means everything they inherited, through their mother, from her uncle, a minor third generation impressionist.
Other than the price it will fetch, what does a beautiful, if chilly, Corot landscape mean to those lucky enough to have to wonder?
And beyond that, what were the lives surrounding such paintings when they rested on private walls? What did that Art Nouveau furniture mean to the Berthiers before the Musee D’Orsay expressed an interest?
If you think, for one minute, that “Summer Hours” is a dry, chilly lucubration on the meaning of history, forget it. This is an absolutely exquisite movie. It’s a warm, allusive, subtle, thoughtful and very wise film about the very nature of civilization. Objects that we eventually imprison and exhibit in museums were once loved and needed by living breathing human beings that sometimes lavished them with personal meaning. Houses that are inevitably destined for abandonment were once centers of teeming life, some public and contentious, some secret and illicit.
This summer house’s cook and housekeeper, Eloise, is a human treasure, just like the house she was crucial to.
The movie you’re watching is from 54-year-old French director Olivier Assayas (“Boarding Gate,” “Ima Vep,” “Clean”). He’s the son of screenwriter Jacques Remy, which makes the stylistic sure-handedness and beauty of the film unsurprising.
The film is almost an illustration of what it’s about. Who values this sort of ultra-civilized and Chekhovian film anymore? Certainly not those whose self-confidently philistine American joke might be that “it’s like watching paint dry.” (In case you want to credit the joke, it appeared first in Arthur Penn’s great film “Night Moves.”)
Question: Is watching the paint dry on a Vermeer or a Rene Magritte the same as watching it dry on your neighbor’s house? Sometimes, after all, films that flow slowly are the ones with life’s force and conviction.
Well, this one is. Don’t expect an ending, by the way, that’s explicit and bangs you on the head with meaning. The one you get, like the film, comes at an angle. In Emily Dickinson’s phrase, it tells the truth but it tells it slant.
The French cast is marvelous, including an almost unrecognizable Juliette Binoche, hidden and dowdified in oversized sweat shirts — almost a living version of a broken Degas sculpture stashed away in cellophane.
Bless the French. Who else can make such films as this these days?•
"Summer Hours"
Four stars
STARRING: Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jeremie Renier and Edith Scob DIRECTOR: Olivier Assayas
RUNNING TIME: 102 min.
RATING: No rating but PG equivalent for mature subject matter
THE LOWDOWN: Grown children struggle to figure out what their valuable “museum quality” inheritance means to them after their mother dies. In French with English subtitles.
jsimon@buffnews.com
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