Looking for a legacy

Summer Hours is a subtle and elegant family
drama about art and memory

HEIRLOOMS APPARENT: Summer Hours

by MARK SLUTSKY

Most of us will never have to confront the choice of whether to hang onto our priceless family heirlooms or donate them to a museum like the characters in Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, but that doesn’t make his new film less poignant. Everyone will, at some point, deal with the messy business of moving on, of deciding how much of the past it’s feasible, or even desirable, to hang on to, and that question is one of many raised by Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover) in this subtle and elegantly-crafted film.

The action in Summer Hours takes place mostly around a charming little French country house; fitting, for it’s the fate of the house and its contents that possesses the characters. Three grown-up kids meet there as the movie opens, for the 75th birthday of their mother (Edith Scob). There’s Jeremie (Jeremie Rénnier), who works in China for a multinational, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), a New York-based designer and Frederic (Charles Berling), the only one of the three to still live in France.

It’s Frederic who’s most alarmed when his mother expresses her wish that the house and its contents be sold after her death. Her uncle, with whom she clearly had a complicated relationship, was a famous artist, and it might serve posterity better if his possessions were in a museum—reasonable, but to him it represents a further fragmenting of a family legacy already diffused across the globe. When, a little later in the film, they return to the house after her death, the dilemma becomes a conflict between his dedication to the family and the wishes of both his late mother and his siblings, both eager to put down roots outside of France.

Summer Hours is the result of an interesting partnership with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (it was originally meant to be a short commissioned to celebrate the museum’s 20th anniversary). As such, it’s an unusually art-driven film, a feature-length rumination on its place in people’s everyday lives. It’s also a very well-made and performed family drama, a smart film that deals with complex ideas but still feels very natural. Assayas has made some very different, often audacious films in his career; this feels more mature, but no less stimulating.

SUMMER HOURS OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JUNE 5