"Summer Hours"

By David Hudson on 05/13/2009

[Updated through 5/15]

"After the freaky, far out, frequently dystopic pleasures of Olivier Assayas's last three films - Connie Nielsen clad in leather fetish wear in the Hellfire Club in 'demonlover' (2002), Maggie Cheung as a transnational rock star struggling to stay off junk and be reunited with her young son in 'Clean' (2004), and Asia Argento diddling herself before jetting off to Hong Kong and intrigue in 'Boarding Gate' (2007) - the director returns home for his twelfth fiction film, to a bourgeois French family trying to negotiate the past, present, and future, in the mournful 'Summer Hours.'" Melissa Anderson for Artforum: "As in the triptych that precedes it, 'Summer Hours' is a film about globalization - though, this time, serving not as a springboard for genre tinkering but as the source of a deep melancholy and anxiety over the state of French history and culture."

"Too chatty to be ascetic, 'Summer Hours' is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value - as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world."

"When Frederic [Charles Berling], Adrienne [Juliette Binoche], and their younger brother, Jeremie (Jérémie Renier), inherit the home and the paintings, sculptures, and furniture within it (a collection of such artistic significance that the Musee d'Orsay expresses interest), they must decide what to do with the estate - a challenge, since Adrienne lives in the US and Jeremie has relocated to Beijing." Chris Wisniewski for indieWIRE: "Like many of Assayas's characters, these two are citizens of a flattening world where national borders feel increasingly irrelevant, but their dilemma is (like the film itself) parochial, tied to a place and a past they left behind."

"[I]t's the kind of film through which [Assayas's] subtle and disarmingly complex gifts achieve beautiful fulfillment," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "The sober realism in which Summer Hours plays out bursts into something grand with a stunning fare-thee-well, completing a circle with another celebration at the now nearly vacated house: a party hosted by Frederic's teenage children that steers thankfully clear of kids-today cynicism. Following curly-haired, pot smoking Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing) in an ebullient roaming long take as she turns the quiet family haven into a brief, impromptu musical, Assayas merges carefree adolescence with its longing for the fading idyll of childhood, a place abstract and more poignantly palpable in the dwellings we must inevitably leave behind."

"The obvious comparison is to Chekhov's 'Cherry Orchard,' with its harsh coming of a new social order and passing of one that's lovely but essentially useless (or, at least, nonutilitarian)," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Underneath the mundane exchanges here, great forces are at work - globalization, the disintegration of a culture, and the triumph of economic forces over art. But masterpieces make their own rules, and 'Summer Hours' is spare, glancing, tactile - sui generis."

"[U]ltimately, Assayas is grappling with the quandry of whether or not one generation should be responsible for maintaining a legacy that, in practical terms, will determine merely whether or not the next generation will have a place to vacation," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "But of course, legacy is never that simple; into this potentially pedestrian inquiry, Assayas draws in a number of increasingly esoteric debates - on function vs Form, national identity vs personal, history vs future."

This is "as brightly alive a movie as the season will offer," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. Assayas has "never made a movie this vital, his purest filmmaking pushing the characters into unspoken uncertainty and evaporating legacy."

"[T]he writer-director of some of the most sharp-edged critiques of modern mores in the French cinema has softened his approach, except as regards his dour view of museums as dark places that embalm art objects instead of enhancing them," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Meantime, Joe Bowman's just revisited "demonlover."

Interviews with Assayas: David Fear (Time Out New York), Eric Hynes (Reverse Shot) and Peter Knegt (indieWIRE).

Earlier: Dennis Lim's profile of Assayas for the New York Times and reviews from last fall's New York Film Festival and its summertime run in 2008 in the UK.

Updates, 5/14: "What distinguishes this Assayas movie from the others is the manner with which it sustains an unspoiled blend of the intimately emotional with the unequivocally intellectual," writes IFC guest critic Gene Seymour. "The cumulative strengths of 'Summer Hours' as a philosophic elegy and a generational saga are powerful enough to throw everything else Assayas has done in illuminated relief."

"For André Téchiné and Patrice Chéreau, who have specialized in probing/expansive family melodramas, 'Summer Hours' would be a trifle," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "For Olivier Assayas, it's almost a masterpiece."

James van Maanen: "If the writer/director's latest is not a great film - it may well be one - it's certainly his greatest and will no doubt appear on numerous 'Best' lists, come the end of the year, just as did last year's 'A Christmas Tale' by Assayas's compatriot, Arnaud Desplechin - a film which sprang to mind a number of times while watching 'Summer Hours.' The two movies share a fine cinematographer, Eric Gautier, as well as the French penchant for understatement, philosophizing and making interesting connections in unusual ways."

"'Summer Hours' drags in the middle, but its final scene is almost overpoweringly tender and beautiful, offering a hopeful rejoinder to all the prior scenes of family members shedding their shared legacy," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Assayas seems to suggest that our attachment to people, places, and objects may change, but there's always another generation ready to make new memories out of what we leave behind."

Updates, 5/15: "'Summer Hours,' despite its expansive, relaxed opening, is remarkably tense, tramping through five or six set-pieces with little time for detours," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door:

The famously jittery and visually brilliant Assayas has made his first film that could truly be labeled "literary" (in a totally non-pejorative way; "literary" does not automatically equal "non-cinematic"). Dialogue has at least as much weight as visuals, which wasn't true before, and the dialogue seems constructed in a way that's just as pleasing and compressed transcribed as on-screen. (Frédéric: "She talked about death." Wife: "In those terms?" "No. She talked about the house, my great-uncle's sketches." "She talked about death." "Like I said.")

This has the beneficial side-effect of preventing Assayas from beating his familiar visual motifs even further to death than "Boarding Gate" - with its too-predictable image of LCD projectors colonizing Asia Argento's face with global karaoke culture, et al - did. "Irma Vep" is obviously a great film, but "Demonlover" is almost as great (and one of the decade's great zeitgeist films), and "Summer Hours" makes the same concerns he's been mulling over since then fresh in explicit verbal formulations; it's consistent but not wearisome. When Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) announces "The house doesn't mean very much to me anymore. France either," she might as well be speaking for Assayas.

"After futzing around with rock stars and glossy filmmaking in quasi-genre mode, Assayas makes an assured return to the kind of rock-solid, low-key cinema on which reputations are built," writes Bryant Frazer.

"[W]hile Mr Assayas's filmmaking techniques are identifiably of the moment - and his sensibility is as thoroughly French as the long, painstakingly prepared family meals that punctuate 'Summer Hours' - the assurance and aesthetic poise of the film make it quietly ravishing," writes AO Scott in the NYT.

"'Late August, Early September' is the Assayas film to which 'Summer Hours' feels closest, but the exploration of mortality and middle age here is far freer of anxiety," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News.

"The whole movie is like that last sliver of sunlight on a late-summer day, a slice of gold that you can't hang onto forever, as much as you wish you could," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, where she also talks with Assayas.

"Offering all the pleasures of the polished ensemble picture - crisp talk, suave acting, mise-en-scene of effortless sophistication - 'Summer Hours' is a singularly perceptive take on a French genre as traditional as the nature morte." Nathan Lee for NPR: "As Assayas chronicles the bittersweet negotiations regarding the family inheritance, he considers as well the soul of France itself."

"'Summer Hours' is probably opening about three months too early: who wants to feel wistful about the dying of the light in May?" asks Phil Nugent in Screengrab. "But it is strongly recommended for those who are counting the seconds between episodes of 'Antiques Roadshow.'"

Matt Mazur talks with Assayas for PopMatters.

[Photo: "Summer Hours," IFC Films, 2008]

Tags: Alice de Lencquesaing, Charles Berling, French Cinema, Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche, Olivier Assayas, Summer Hours