Rating: * * * * *
Verdict: Small and perfect.
At once lush and austere, packed with meaning and yet light on its feet, this small, powerful and quite perfect film is part of a grand French tradition: movies that find, in the ebb and flow of middle-class life,
the joys and pains of being human.
It's a film about so many things: the assault on cultural tradition by globalised capitalism; the difference between value and price; the uneasy process by which siblings learn to come to terms with their shared and separate pasts; the secrets that people take to their graves; and, most important, what we inherit from our parents beyond the objects that they leave behind.
It also reminds us that great pieces of art can have different significances - as cultural treasures and personal possessions. But Assayas, who also wrote the script, wraps it all up in a delicate story of such specificity that we just feel privileged to eavesdrop for a while on the life of a single family.
The meticulously constructed three-part screenplay begins with Helene Berthier (Scob), an elegant widow, celebrating her 75th birthday in her modest but handsome country house near Paris. In attendance are her two sons, Jeremie (Renier, who played the title character in The Vintner's Luck) and Frederic (Berling), along with their wives and kids, and her daughter Adrienne (Binoche).
The house is packed with the great art (including works by Corot and Redon) owned by Helene's late brother and she takes Frederic, the eldest, aside, to explain how much she wants the collection to remain intact when she dies.
This sets in motion a small quasi-Chekhovian family drama that is played out in the film's succeeding two acts. Two of the siblings are based abroad and the drama that unfolds after Helene's death turns on the differences of aspiration and temperament without resorting to cheap histrionics or even raised voices. It's a wistful film, driven much more by sorrow than anger, but full of love as well, both of the director for his characters and the characters for each other.
In the hands (often literally) of the great cinematographer Eric Gautier, the camera moves fluidly through the film's interior and exterior spaces. An unseen interloper, it seems to note, as if by accident, fragments of what's occurring; Assayas wants us to be left with the slightly sobering sense that, like him, we cannot fully know the depth of feeling that is being tapped here.
Originally conceived as part of a series of films to mark the 20th anniversary of the Musee d'Orsay, Summer Hours is similar in tone to Hou Hsiao-hsien's sublime Flight of the Red Balloon, and is likely to excite the same audiences. It's hard to recommend it too highly.
Peter Calder
Cast:
Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jeremie Renier, Edith Scob
Director: