Summer Hours

Before this film I had seen two of Oliver Assayas' work: Demonlovers, which I found incomprehensible, and Boarding Gate, a standard and seamy thriller. Therefore I was totally surprised by Summer Hours, which on first glance appears to be a pastoral drama about artsy-fartsy French people, but on further investigation is a metaphor for the crumbling of European culture.

We begin at a gathering of the Marly family. The widowed mother, celebrating her 75th birthday, is obsessed with how her house and pieces of art will be distributed after her death. Her uncle was a famous painter and collector, and she seems to regard his legacy and these objects with more affection than her own family.

She has three children, played by Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, and Jérémie Renier. Berling is an economist who doesn't consider economics a science, Binoche is an edgy designer of housewares, living in New York and working for a Japanese department store chain and Renier works for Puma sneakers in China. The matriarch, Edith Scob, recognizes that Binoche and Renier are unlikely to ever live in France again, so she urges Berling, who lives locally and will be the executor of her will, to sell everything.

When the old lady dies, the film goes into how the three siblings deal with her inheritance. Berling, sentimentally, wants to hang on to the past as much as possible, but recognizes the wisdom of Binoche and Renier, who tell him that having a country house in France is not a benefit to them. Binoche is marrying an American, and Renier is accepting a promotion that will keep him in China for the foreseeable future. His children speak French at home, but go to an English-language school and have a fondness for American culture.

This film says a lot of smart things and in clever ways. For example, the film is bookended by parties at the country house. The opening has children in a treasure hunt, romping through the verdant grounds as their ancestors could have. The close finds one of these same children, a teenage granddaughter, throwing a party for her friends, who arrive on noisy motorcycles, play loud music on their laptops, and pass around joints. Assayas shows us the global economy has chipped away at the vault of French culture (and by extension, the other old world nations) and is being replaced by a world culture that is like a rude guest at a garden party.

There is much to admire about this film. The script is like a Swiss watch in it's structure and economy of parts. We hear Binoche and Renier say that they are unlikely to return to France, and then we realize that they have disappeared from the film. Asssayas also skillfully uses the camera. At times it is unmoving, as if we were seated at a party, and characters move in and out of frame. But then, as if we got up and are mingling, the camera moves through space, and his choice of when to do each are spot-on.

The acting is restrained and very good. Berling is the emotional center of the film, the man who tries to hold his family culture together at impossible odds. After some of his mother's things are donated to a museum and he visits them, he remarks that they look like they are caged. Binoche is also very good as a woman who has more going on than she's willing to tell us. There's a fragility beneath her steely exterior.

I think the thing I most appreciated about this film was that it didn't go where lesser films would go. After the mother dies there are numerous discussions of how the property should be divided, but for the most part the siblings come to accord. A lesser film would have been all about screaming matches, and the opening of old wounds. Assayas isn't interested in simple family melodrama, though. There's more afoot.