by Joel Bocko
[#48 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.]
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“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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“I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.”
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“Poor Mole stood alone in the road, his heart torn asunder and a big sob gathering, gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him, to leap up to the surface presently, he knew, in passionate escape. … Meanwhile, the wafts from his old home pleaded, whispered, conjured, and finally claimed him imperiously. He dared not tarry longer within their magic circle. With a wrench that tore his very heartstrings, he set his face down the road and followed submissively in the track of the Rat, while faint, thin little smells, still dogging his retreating nose, reproached him…”
. . . . .
Summer Hours, The Decline and Fall of the French Bourgeoisie, Three Generations. Olivier Assayas’ absorbing and poignant film is first an observation of life’s fleeting moments (one might say it’s more observant than the characters who experience these moments, without really appreciating them). It is also a wailing elegy to a France crumbling away in the globalized world, letting its culture and its people dribble from its borders like sand from a smashed hourglass. And finally the movie is a portrait of one family, three generations (old, middle-aged, young) and three siblings in that middle group (brother, sister, brother), who slowly and willingly lose their country home, and with it their fragile communal identity. These two triumvirates, the generations and siblings, are each anchored in the center – chronological in the case of the age group (those in the middle of their life dominate the running time of the film), geographic in the case of the brothers and sisters (the deceased matriarch’s eldest son lives in France and tries to hold the family together, while his sister flees west to New York, and his little brother flees east to China). Alas, as is so often the case, the center does not hold.
Above all, Summer Hours is the tale of a family home, a beacon broadcasting the state of this brood’s soul. The country house belonging to this Gallic clan (whose family name, oddly enough, we never quite catch) is a torch passed from generation to generation, but it does not burn brightly for all time. In the beginning, it is a wan flame threatening to go out; eventually, it seems to have been extinguished altogether, the steam hissing in the rains of time and distance. Then, briefly in the end, it flickers back to life again, the embers glowing luminously for what we know will be the last time. Perhaps its fuel is the spirit of the absent patriarch, long deceased, an uncle rather than a father, with whom Hélène (Edith Scob) may have had an incestuous affair. He was a painter, and his work and legacy overhang everything: the emotional scars passed down to his grand-nieces and nephews, the economic decisions about how to sell and split up his home, artworks, and possessions, the half-remembered anecdotes passed down to his grandchildren, who are brief witnesses to a past evaporating before their eyes.
Having seen a trailer for this movie not long ago, in which the familial tensions and outbursts were heightened and exaggerated, I was surprised to discover that all in fact does not end in turmoil. There are fissures and clashes to be sure. Youngest brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) and oldest brother, the sensitive Frédéric (Charles Berling), snap at one another in front of a lawyer, who barely raises an eyebrow. Gathering after the funeral, Frédéric proposes (nay, assumes) that they will keep their home and as Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jérémie gently disabuse him of this notion, we can see that he is crushed. Late in the movie, between auctions and assessments and meetings with lawyers and appointments with the government, Frédéric must rush off to a police station, bailing his daughter out for petty theft and possession of hashish. When we met her in the opening scenes, she was still a loping, gangly, girly preteen; by now she’s sporting a leather jacket, with an attitude to match. Nothing stays the same.
And yet, all of this minor discord and dysfunction is quite normal, a fact which the characters – for all their fatigue and frustration – never forget. There are no teary goodbyes, no ferocious fights, no desperate and morbid self-analyses. Instead, they quietly go their separate ways, do what must be done, and bid their roots adieu. Fitzgerald be damned, they’ve broken their ties to the past, selling off their cherished objects and talismans one by one, bartering their slices of the famed uncle’s cultural inheritance, moving forward until the future envelopes them and they are selling sneakers in Peking, vacationing in Bali, designing kooky knicknacks in Manhattan, or lingering behind to brood in melancholy Paris. Having invoked a couple Brits and an American to set the scene, let us now quote an Yankee Englishman, himself an exile who know something about the confused homesickness of modernity: “This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Ultimately, however, this is not the way Assayas’ world ends, despite the fact that we take our warmly, wearily cynical leave of Frédéric and his wife in a museum cafeteria, on a note of mordant mirth. Their family furniture displayed before an indifferent public in the Musée d’Orsay, all traces of their tactile history finally obliterated by a coat of prestige, it suddenly seems an awful bother to care about anything at all, and so the couple burst into spontaneous, bitter laughter. (Incidentally, this is the second in a series of French films sponsored by that famous museum, the first being Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon; both films utilize the institution to coolly demonstrate the distance between modern life and the warmth of the past – this is especially true of Summer Hours.) No, Assayas does not conclude with this bittersweet coda, nor with the mournful visit of the family maid to the abandoned home, peeking in through the locked windows; instead Summer Hours closes by embracing the refreshing life-force of youth. The grandchildren are throwing a party for a hundred or so friends at the soon-to-be-sold estate, and at first glance, this could seem a depressing climax. Here we have kids and booze and pop music infiltrating these sacred grounds, more familiar with uncorked bottles of wine, aching wisps of cello and harpsichord in the air, and quiet, reflective evenings surrounded by old furniture and half-finished sketches.
Instead, the party seems to bring the house alive for the first time in the movie. Even when it was first presented, we knew the house was doomed, past its prime. The family seemed almost like ghosts as they enjoyed their last summer day in this palace of their youth. Here, stripped bare, facing the final liquidation of its familial ties, this place finally feels lived-in. Throughout the movie the camera has been restlessly on the move, gracefully twirling around its characters and tracing paths that they could not keep up with. Now, our view moves in tandem with these energetic young bodies, following them instead of racing ahead. The pent-up vigor has been given an outlet and it overflows until the grounds glow. In their enthusiastic naivitee, the teenagers awaken the latent sense of discovery, romance, and adventure that must have roamed the halls and gardens back when the famous uncle mused over his art, when Hélène’s youth bloomed in the summer breeze, when Frédéric dreamed that his magic circle would never be punctured. Now it is the foolish youths who lead us simultaneously into the past and the future, on an Indian summer day when hope and nostalgia intermingle to form a uniquely restless tranquility. Briefly consider that we imagined the onset of autumn, that the prospect of change and decline need no longer frighten us, having discovered that moment which lasts forever.
. . . . .
“As they stared blankly, in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realized all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly on their faces, and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness.”
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• • •
All quotes from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens; The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; and “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot.
Previous entries: The Hurt Locker and Still Life
Next entry: Elephant
This is one of the best films of 2009, and Assayas’ finest and most emotionally resonant work.
Coincidentally enough, this gorgeous film was officially announced yesterday for the Criterion blu-ray treatment in June:
And what lovely cover art there!
Beautiful essay Joel. You captured the fleeting moments of youth and time with a poignancy in your writing that I have not seen before. I was particularly smitten with the way you tied your review with the essence of loss found in the quotes before the essay begins, particularly Graham’s THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, which, for me, is one of the most under-appreciated best written pieces of literature written in its time. Like the Gance film Allan just reviewed yesterday, I have to cattle-prod Sam into setting up a screening of this film the moment it becomes available. Beautiful write-up. Your Pal, Dennis
Dennis, the film has been available for months, and I’ve had the Region 2 in this house for over eight weeks. I will definitely be double dipping with the Criterion though.
Dennis, thanks – I really appreciate that. I’m always a bit skeptical of the foreign films which indulge in bourgeois pathos and eschew the energy of the New Wave (which dissipated so long ago, when France basically returned to the “tradition of quality” – at least as far as what I’ve watched suggests). But I’ll admit this one resonated for me, as I have a large extended family and an attachment to places of my youth, some of which are gone (shades of John Lennon). Besides which, of course, it’s a genuinely good movie, subtly scripted and acted.
Btw, if you love Wind in the Willows, you’re in for a treat. Stay tuned to the Dancing Image this spring as my long-planned treatment of the book and the film adaptations, in a multipart series with images and video, should finally be going up. I hope to start work on it this weekend, though it could be as long as another month or 2 before it’s unveiled.
Sam, this is actually my first Assayas – interesting you find it his best. I’ll look forward to the others.
Did anyone else know Tom Hanks is planning to re-make this film? Not sure how that will turn out.
Joel, this is easily the best assessment that I have ever read of this particular film. Well done!
I saw it some 18 months ago, so my memory of it has dimmed a little. However, I know that what really stuck in my craw about the work was the fact that it was actually commissioned by the Musee d’Orsay. Hence, I find myself capable of putting an entirely different spin on the film – one where it becomes a very craftily written and paid-for advertisement for explaining to well-to-do French families that there are tax advantages to donating their antique furniture to the museum.
Now, this is not to denigrate your review of the film, as it is an entirely valid interpretation of the work. However, I could not help but chuckle a little at how well you assess the scenes involving the middle-aged siblings, as the raison d’etre for the film was to cook up some realistic depiction or other of them needing to “move on”, “let go of the past” and “do something with all of that furniture”!
Still, like you, I thought that it was a sorry site to see furniture that had been well used for its original purpose now sitting there varnished and underutilised in some exhibition room.
Perhaps I am too much of an idealist and too suspicious of money’s corrupting influence on the arts. If so, I can live with that! You should hear what I think of “Somer’s Town”! 😉
Thanks, Longman Oz. To me, that connection to the Musee d’Orsay is replete with irony. It’s almost as if Assayas takes that risk of making a commercial for donating to the state and turns it on its head: this option is shown as being sad, dim, lifeless. Instead of concealing the connection to the institution, as Flight of the Red Balloon does, Summer Hours flaunts the connection…but makes it look rather unfortunate! I’m not sure this was entirely his intention, as we do get some looks at behind-the-scenes work to store & preserve the goods, but even these are ambivalent and the final scene in the museum seems plainly to cast the whole French cultural milieu as an ineffective cul-de-sac. Sure they can keep a few knicknacks that tourists will walk past, but families are falling apart and France’s best and brightest are flocking to other lands. The emotional climax of the middle-aged generation’s story takes place not in front of some beautiful artwork or stunning gallery, but in the museum’s metallic cafeteria!
Incidentally, these aren’t necessarily my views on the value of museums but they have a point and, more importantly, I think they keep Assayas’ work from merely being a high-toned advertisement.
Point taken and I would breeze past any such exhibition, if I was to be honest about it! Painting and sculpture are more of my thing!
At the same time, I did consider the fact that Mr. Assayas is a little bit subversive in such scenes. However, you either have freedom of expression as an artist or you do not!
Now, many films show a few fancy shots of some place or other in order to secure funding from the regional authority in question and, well, need I say anything at all about the ruination that is product placement?
However, when the paymasters are dictating the actual plot of the film, I do become uncomfortable about the whole enterprise – especially when I am paying to go to see the film.
Also, yes, the film does not hide the fact that the MdO commissioned the work. However, I had to wait for the end credits to learn this! 😉
“Above all, Summer Hours is the tale of a family home, a beacon broadcasting the state of this brood’s soul. The country house belonging to this Gallic clan (whose family name, oddly enough, we never quite catch) is a torch passed from generation to generation, but it does not burn brightly for all time.”
Absolutely Joel, and I was sufficiently tied up yesterday to neglect this tremendous essay with a quick comment. While making a number of acute observations about contemporary life and familial relationships, I think the film candidly examines the narcissism that exists in estate situations like this, where people will always take care of Number 1 first. But as you yourself argue here in your paragraph beginning with “Having seen a trailer” this is the normal course of events, and there is an underlining universality in these sometimes contentious exchanges, which inform the myriad maneuverings after the death of a parent.
There was a piercing Ingmar Bergman-like poignancy in the lovely but mysterious character of the film’s matriarch who portends her own death early on.
But here’s a vital point (great metaphor too!) in this exhaustive piece that I applaud you on:
“It is also a wailing elegy to a France crumbling away in the globalized world, letting its culture and its people dribble from its borders like sand from a smashed hourglass.”
The Bergman analogy is astute; and as you point out there is a strong selfish element to all the behavior on display, particularly that of the middle-aged children, whose burden it is to dispose of the estate. Nonetheless, the mother comes off somewhat sympathetically – narcissistic but also stoic; and the son, with his wounded and outmoded nostalgia, is also likable. Binoche and the younger son, by contrast, appear rather glib.
There’s quite a few essays that could be spun from this subtly ambitious movie, and while I ended up focusing on the one that interested me most – the passing of a family’s history – one could easily do a sociological take, an aesthetic one, a cinematic one (the ties to other films), and so forth. Thanks for the comments – I enjoyed writing this one.
This may contradict the point that I am arguing above. However, I plead the right to be a complex and contrary individual!
Anyway, I really did like the way that the two younger siblings turned on Frédéric here. It felt terribly realistic.
Equally, I admired Hélène’s attitude that her passion for curating the life of her uncle should die with her. Perhaps it was too selfless to ring entirely true. However, there was something endearingly pragmatic in such an attitude! Indeed, could a man ever feel this casually throwaway, I wonder, about his life’s work?
Longman, I actually didn’t realize the film was commissioned until I looked on the IMDb page, but it certainly made since (didn’t know it about the Red Balloon film either until then – funny that Binoche was in both). Someone suggested that rather than make this film, Tom Hanks do a MoMA-sponsored film, i.e. an American take on the cultural-promotion thing. But really, that’s not quite the American way, is it? 😉
Nice review! I saw this movie a second time last week and it was as absorbing and thought provoking as the first time.
Tom Hanks remaking it, say it isn’t true!
An excellent and enjoyable review of my favorite film of 2009. (Bright Star’s a very close second.) This film is so quiet and subtle and yet with so many layers of meaning and emotion and ways to interpret its meaning. I’m impressed you captured so many of them in your elegant review. Nice work.
Thanks Jenny and Anu! I know Jenny how much you revere this film (hence yout top placement) and likewise Anu, I’ve long known of your own affinity for it. Craig Kennedy and Ed Howard penned magisterial treatment at their sites (I know it is Craig’s #1 too) and while I love the film too (it placed in my Top 10 of 2009) I yield to the unbridaled passion of Joel, Jenny, Craig, Ed and Anu. Joel really hit a grand slam here, and I’m not being over effusive. It’s one of his masterpieces!
Thanks, Anu and jennybee – and Sam, for his effusive – er, generous? – praise.
I can’t imagine the Tom Hanks adaptation will do the material any favors but it will be fascinating and perhaps depressing (though, maybe not, if one can accept or even embrace the inherent differences of French and American films, even the latter is an independent).