Ah! Blessed Serendipity! Two luminous unsentimental French films in three bountiful weeks (first One Day, You'll Understand with Jeanne Moreau, now Summer Hours with glam blonde, Juliette Binoche), both family stories, pivoted around a grande dame dowager, willfully preserving secrets of her personal past while disposing of the treasured clutter of bric-a-brac, forever an intricate part of her existence: paintings, tea-sets, ceramics.
I'm a big fan of Olivier Assayas' sensibility (a former reviewer for Les Cahiers due Cinéma). To the NYT, Assayas observed: We don’t want to know what we’re going to do with the cupboard that was in our mother’s living room. We don’t want to deal with the album of family pictures in the chest of drawers.... One day you become owner of those pictures, and you have no idea who these people were, but they are handed to you as somehow precious. Once you start turning the pages, he added, you get lost in the void of that unreachable past.
Yes, that unreachable past.
Because L'heure d'éte, like One Day, You'll Understand, is very French, the players all behave like civilized adults, talking (and listening) in full sentences, providing astute observations on their own circumstances. As John McKay pointed out last week during our post-O'Horten discussion, democracy is an precious value for movie goers. We can all make up our own minds what is going on. And once again here, Summer Hours, like Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, we the audience are viscerally invited in to bear silent witness to intimate family events as they unfold. It's a movie more about characters who inhabit this movie than events that happen to them. Note in that regard, the extraordinary camera work of Eric Gautier, his curious lens becoming our unobtrusive eyes, observing the exquisite decor, the courteous response, the sideways glance.
Summer Hours is also very much a meditation about Art that comes out of real lives: what is beauty and why we surround our lives with beautiful stuff. What the dowager adores, her kids seem prepared to dispose of, her grandkids resent losing. In the closing credits, we discover that Assayas, instead of making movie prop furniture, painting and ceramics, has borrowed the genuine articles from the great museums of Paris. Assaya's initial concept was to explore how art comes from real life and ends up in a museum, he said, as if in a zoo or a mausoleum, and how ultimately that changes the very nature of art.
Ah! French movies! You just gotta love 'em!
The heirs: glorious Juliette Binoche, flanked by Jérémie Renier and Charles Berling
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