This French film begins with a 75th birthday party and ends with a teenage girl taking some tentative steps into adulthood. In between, the relentless cycle of life is explored through the prism of three generations of the same family.
The elegant Hélène (Edith Scob) is the matriarch of a family scattered to the four winds and who now lives in the rural family home with just her long-suffering housekeeper (Isabelle Sadoyan) for company. She is devoted to preserving and promoting the name of her uncle, an artist of modest repute. Moreover, the house appears to be bulging with various antiques of value.
Her death, though, brings certain unspoken tensions to a head between her three children, two of whom now live abroad. The oldest, an academic (Charles Berling), wants to preserve the family home and the works within it.The others have lost touch with those days and have practical financial matters to address. Accordingly, decisions over the inheritance need to get made.
Now I agree that this does sound like a rather galling discussion to have to listen in on. However, there is a certain voyeuristic realisation on your part that this is a discussion that most siblings sadly have to have sooner or later. Therefore, in true soap opera style, you do want to know how it works out between them.
At the same time, the film fortunately does extend beyond that in terms of its ambition! It also portrays a keen sense of life being for the living. Hélène is insistent that her interests in preserving the past die with her. Frédéric, mostly out of a sense of filial duty, is inclined to disagree. However, his own life is complicated by raising children of his own, as well as other challenges that are to befall him. In this sense, Frédéric is representative of middle age – having to accept that not everything in life can be as he wants it to be, but learning to accept the pleasures that his life does offer him.
Finally, there is Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing), the daughter of Frédéric. The early scenes show her frolicking with the other children. Later on, she has a run-in with the law. However, when she brings all of her friends to the old house for a party, the sense is clearly that she is now less of a child and now more of a woman. Once more, so, time has had its effect. and the cycle continues.
This film was brought about with the support of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Inevitably, this makes it another film with a sense of product placement to it, given that it overtly promotes the idea that there are inheritance tax benefits from turning over valuable antiques to the French State. At the same time, there is an interesting debate throughout the film regarding aesthetics versus utility. This leads to several nicely worked tongue-in-cheek moments. There is also the rather sad transition of a fine-looking desk from being a busy place of work to being just some more pieces of adjoined wood sitting there all polished and shiny in a museum for visitors to breeze nonchalantly past.
On the whole, Summer Hours is a little ponderous and erratic as a work. Equally, it is somewhat devoid of drama. However, it does engage in the subjects of death and the continuity of life in a manner that both avoids over-sentimentality and provokes some worthy thought on the subject. Above all, though, it paints a picture of family life from a variety of perspectives. Even if this can feel a little cobbled together at times, it does capture that sense of different and assertive points of view having to figure out ways of all getting along together. In the end, familial love wins out over property and objects.
This is a film that is unlikely change your life, but which possesses a simple and touching beauty that should enrich it a little.
Filed under: Cinema, Films, Movies | Tagged: Alice de Lencquesaing, Charles Berling, Dominique Reymond, Edith Scob, Isabelle Sadoyan, Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche, L'Heure d'été, Musée d'Orsay, Olivier Assayas, Summer Hours, Valérie Bonneton
***CONTAINS PLENTY OF SPOILERS***
It’s rather late to be posting this commentary, but it might be useful to anyone who missed the screening and is thinking of renting it or buying the DVD. This oeuvre was another in a series that the film critics seem to have skipped, but nonetheless write about as if they had seen it, repeating the same things that the distributors have written for the press, which is basically a synopsis of the movie. Their comments are brief, and leave nothing to the imagination. You can read them everywhere, The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury-News. And to that extent, they are accurate. Summer Hours is skin deep, and fairly predictable. Everything is staged for maximum eye appeal, with no rough edges. Yet it pretends to be naturel. Again we are treated to the usual cast of “normal French people”: the secret lover of a great artist (their story is only talked about in gossipy terms), the “fashionable designer-consultant”, “the handsome young globe trotting Nike shoe executive charged with expanding the business in La Chine”, the brilliant, self-effacing economiste-intellectuelle whom we see criticized by another intellectuelle during a radio interview. And lest you think everything is just divine in these people’s lives, the daughter of the economiste is picked up by the cops for shoplifting and possessing weed. The benignly paternal police let her, and him off with a warning. On the way home, the modest economist-father gently interrogates the daughter about he company she’s been keeping, in bed and otherwise. Oh! those naughty French! Have I spoiled anything? Go see this if you want to sop up some of that whispy nostalgie intellectuelle , the precious gardens, the country home, the objets d’art, the product placements (I think Renault bankrolled this movie, with some help from the Musee d’ Orsay.) But don’t say I didn’t warn you!
I have some sympathy for the argument that expresses frustration with why some French directors feel the need to add unnecessary pseudo-intellectual aspects to their work and/or base them solely in well-to-do family settings. However, I am happy to steer you in the direction of other French films that do nothing of the sort.
Its pretty boring to wish to engage me on what other reviewers wrote, especially when you give zero indication of having read my remarks. If you had, I think that you might see how the film has a set of deeper themes than you attribute to it.
Finally, I really fail to see why you are so hot and bothered about it. It is hardly a work with a huge distribution machine behind it. The reality is that you either like world cinema or you are unlikely to ever come across it.
Thank you for your understanding. It’s true I only skimmed your piece because, after four paragraphs, it seemed to be following the same template I remarked upon in my comments. I was not criticizing your critique, per se. As for the deeper themes, these were referenced in the prominent reviews that appeared everywhere, always under three or four star headings, which, again, suckered me in only to find myself idled for nearly two hours of tedium. This was not deep stuff. This was not revelatory. No flashes of insight. No four stars. Not even two and a half. The actors all did their job well enough. No fault there. It was the direction that was flawed. Elsewhere I read a blogger who gushed about Juliette Binoche’s talent for shedding tears: “Obviously director Oliver Assayas knew what he was gonna get when he pointed his camera there, and Juli delivered, as she always does.” That was indeed a fine example of the kind of direction I am referring to. It would have been fine to allow the Binoche character to reveal her inner feelings by shedding a tear or two. But instead, the audience was taken out of the film to witness Binoche make a solo riff on holding back, then releasing tears for what seemed like an eternity. It was embarrasing to watch. All she needed to do was stand up and take a bow so that we could applaud and return to the film. I did enjoy listening to Binoche speak very fine English in a moment she was yearning for news from her ex-patriot world. It was one of the few authentic moments and set her character apart from the rest of the ensemble. As to your belief that “It is hardly a work with a huge distribution machine behind it. The reality is that you either like world cinema or you are unlikely to ever come across it” I only partly agree. European cinema, or course, does not have the muscle of the American movie industry. It depends to a fairly high degree on government subsidies. And certain directors and a cadre of actors get the lion’s share of the subsidy pie. That this film reached our shores has little to do with the quality of the film (but that is merely my opinion). The influence of Binoche, a very fine actress and certainly a mega-star in France, was decisive. She has stated that she “had to do it” when she read the script. Hmmm. Could it be that her father–a director, actor, and sculptor– and her mother–a teacher, director, and actress– in short, her own childhood, had anything to do with this story coming forward? I would like to have seen this story handled by Woody Allen. The truth about the family dynamics surrounding the divvying up of the family treasures would have received a more honest and, dare I say, universal treatment. Instead, we were treated once again to “unnecessary pseudo-intellectual aspects” , “in well-to-do family settings”. Finally, your assertion that “the reality is that you either like world cinema or you are unlikely to ever come across it” is probably true if you live outside a metro area. Good cinema is what people like. In this instance, the overheard mumblings of the audience as they left “Summer Hour” echoed my own feelings of once again regretting having given credence to the judgement of newspaper film reviewers. Being repeatedly misled by these reviewers, and the time and money wasted, is something to get hot and bothered about. I only wish I could have read THIS review before being suckered again.
That’s why I never read reviews of films before going to see them!
Again, I think you have done my own review a disservice by skimming it. My last sentence alone is hardly a conclusion given to overstating the worth of the film and “enriching your life a little” was definitely meant as a pun on the inheritance theme.
Equally, as it happens, I do not mention Juliette Binoche at all. Not for any particular reason other than the fact that nothing she did here deserved special mention ahead of anyone else (none of them really did, as I recall… but it has been nearly a year!). Instead, as I note in my penultimate paragraph, it is a picture of family life from a variety of perspectives.
Finally, I was mostly writing about the perception of films such as this in Ireland. I cannot comment on North American cinema-going culture.
[...] Despite demanding your attention for a gargantuan two-and-a-half hour run-time, this remarkably dense film only drags in a few places. Indeed, one of the beautiful attributes of Mr. Desplechin’s work here is how well A Christmas Tale rewards repeat viewing. Like being a guest at a party full of the host’s family members, it can all seem a bit overwhelming the first time around. However, having broken the ice in this manner, you are at less of a disadvantage during future encounters with them. It also acts as a good seasonal companion piece to Olivier Assayas’ contemporaneous Summer Hours! [...]