France
4*
Director:
Olivier Assayas
Screenwriter:
Olivier Assayas
Director of Photography:
Éric Gautier
Running time: 103 minutes
Original title: l’Heure d’été
Trees and children are reminders of the passage of time. In the first scene of Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, the grandchildren of the oldest surviving member of the family, Hélène, who is celebrating her 75th birthday with her family, are playfully running around her garden in search of treasure. Hélène lives alone in a big house outside Paris, in the upper-class suburb of Valmondois. The house is filled with works of art, either bought or made by Hélène’s late uncle, the painter Paul Berthier.
Berthier’s name is central to the first thirty minutes, during which Hélène’s conversations with her children mostly serve to gauge their readiness to deal with the house and its memories after her death. Of course, the subject is more or less taboo, and they don’t like the idea of discussing things that have not yet come to pass. Her eldest son, Frédéric, seems especially determined to reassure her that nothing will change and that the family will still spend their holidays at the house that they will maintain as well as she has done.
But Hélène wasn’t born yesterday and has no qualms about her children selling off her collection after her death: “No need to become keepers of the tomb”, she tells her son. She realises that her other two children, Jérémie and Adrienne, have their lives abroad – in Shanghai and New York, respectively – and that it would become more and more difficult for them to call her house home. Memories may last forever, but the development of the present shouldn’t be stunted for the sake of physically preserving the past. As the child who has spent the most amount of time in the house, Frédéric is naturally more attached to the place, and the events of the past strongly echo in the present, for example, the plastic bag from Leclerc containing loose pieces of plaster from a sculpture by Edgar Degas that Frédéric and Jérémie had broken decades earlier.
Somewhat reminiscent of the famously sudden demise of Mrs Ramsay in brackets, in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, we learn that Hélène has passed away, but it takes some time before we realise that weeks, if not months, have elapsed since the family reunion at her home. And Assayas uses the medium of film to elide the jumps in time almost imperceptibly, the content making clear that important events can quickly become mere memories.
Besides all these memories and the different weight that objects have in the eyes of the beholder, the film provides a very refreshing look at the social complexity of inheritance, without ever stooping to the level of melodramatic backstabbing. While Frédéric had counted on his brother and sister to help out with the upkeep of the house because he assumed that the house and its objects are as important to them as it is to him, Jérémie and Adrienne have their lives elsewhere and have not only lost touch with the house but even with the culture and with their country. They have no wish to disillusion their brother, nor to seem like they are acting as a united front against him and shattering his wishes, but the fact of the matter is that the memories of the past cannot extend into the future, because they are no longer the people they were when they were young.
All three siblings are warm, engaging people who like to laugh and don’t have a malicious bone in their body, but want to get to the business of making their own memories. The actors (Charles Berling; Jérémie Renier, looking more mature than ever before; and Juliette Binoche), despite their pedigree, are kept in check by Assayas, who ensures that a character always trumps the actor playing the part.
The issues of time and memory are embedded in the film without ever taking on the air of abstract philosophy, and the filmmaker takes care to follow the characters, instead of leading them to contrived situations of high drama. The end does lose the plot a little, when Frédéric has to pick up his daughter at the police station, but eventually, her own role in the story is made clear, as the final scene demonstrates the possibility of making new memories even though a longtime dream may never be realised.
It is interesting to note that this film was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, an institution that features prominently towards the end of the film, because when Frédéric and his wife look at a piece in the museum that used to be in Hélène’s study and agree that it “is nicely displayed”, it is clear that a museum is not a home but merely an exhibit: pieces without any real context, pretty vases without flowers.