Opening and closing with two very different parties in and around the same sprawling estate in Ile de France, Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours tracks a year in the lives of the family attached to the house on that land, and eventually their inevitable efforts to detach themselves from the objects it harbors.. When we first meet family matriarch Helene Berthier (Edith Scob), her adult children and teenage grandchildren have come from all corners of the globe to celebrate her 75th birthday. Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), the youngest sibling, has moved his French family to China so he can manage a Puma factory. “It’s the future,” he says of his company’s expansion into Peking. “The future is making cheap sneakers?” sniffs Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), a New York-based designer of Japanese flatware who admits to launching her career through total “plagiarism” of one of her mom’s antiques. Overhearing, oldet sibling Frederick, an academic who has recently written a book advancing the theory that “economy is an ilusion,” shouts out the realist middleground between Jeremie’s gung-ho carpetbagger and Adrienne’s knee-jerk anti-capitalist: “America benefits most.”

Summer Hours’ on-screen setting is only at its beginning and end iterally evocative of its title, but all along those summer hours are at stake: ultimately, 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. 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.

Tone changes and seasonal changes go hand in hand. When Helene unexpectedly dies after the launch of a retrospective she helped to organize devoted to her great artist uncle, the film shifts into a chilly fall/winter zone as her grown children bicker over what to do with the house and the many museum-worthy paintings and antiques inside. That process forces Frederick in particular to confront what it means to assign memories to things, as his siblings, both of whom show no sentimentality for France and are committed to riding the wave of global capitalism as far as it will take them, seek to cavalierly sell or donate most of the belongings that their mother held dear. It’s during a post-funeral dinner — the camera floating around the tight space of his Paris apartment, cuts coming only when close-ups becoming necessary — that Frederick realizes that his mother’s romantic aestheticism died with her, and not only can he not resurrect it, he’s the only one likely to miss it. And even his missing will get more complicated, when he learns without a doubt that his mother’s protection of the objects was her way of keeping alive a reverie of an extraordinarily inappropriate relationship. Ultimately, the once-dire situation lightens. Spring quickly gives way to summer’s sluggish glow as Frederick’s teenage daughter finds at the estate a fleeting moment of muggy, melancholic idyll.

Summer Hours was initially motivated by a project sponsored by the Musee d’Orsay, which is one thing the film has in common with Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Flight of the Red Balloon. It’s not the only thing. Both are, in their own ways, contemplations of a French family dealing with the past floating away; in both, both comfort and anxiety come from the fact that past and purpose live on in classic works of French art. Both offer showcases for not large but memorable performances from Binoche, who seems evermore to be in the midst of a career renaissance.

As the chipping paint on the walls of the Berthier home reveals the layers of lives that have overlapped in the space, so do Assayas’ themes tightly overlap, the extent of his inquiry into time and space revealing itself more plainly once the superficial layers are eaten away. It’s not just a film about generational conflict, but the acceleration of difference once a point is reached where there’s no middle ground between holding on to the past and cutting off the chain completely, elders subsequently leaving nothing of themselves for future generations, who themselves are allowed not a glance to the past. As the globe gets smaller, it offers new opportunities for personality types like Adrienne and Jérémie, but it’s also limiting; now that the ancient village where the family house is located is just 50 minutes by train from Paris, the notion of provincialism begins to vanish, and with it the notion of private space.
I’ve seen Summer Hours twice now, and at a recent screening in New York, I felt even more enraptured by it than I did when I first saw it in the Cannes market last year. But on both viewings, one scene has felt startlingly out of place for me. Very late in the film, after the matter of the contents of the house have been resolved and the property itself has been sold, Frederick and his wife have lunch, and the wife mentions that their teenage kids are going to have a party at the estate before the new owners move in. Frederick has recently had a “do as I say, not as I do” confluct with his daughter, and at the news that she and her friends are planning to fill the space once taken up with priceless heirlooms with pot smoke and hip hop for a weekend, he grumbles, “They better behave.” To which his wife responds, “Why?” At this, both adults crack up laughing, and as the camera pulls away, they continue to laugh over the private joke for an uncomfortable length of time. It’s not the verbal exchange that bothers me, but the laughter. The “why?” is essentially the film’s punchline — it alludes to the whole point of the thing, in a way that’s still somewhat enigmatic. But in letting the laugh go on for as long as he does, Assayas hammers the point across to the point where it threatens to turn into farce. In a film that can be shockingly, didactically direct in its themes via pure dialogue, it’s that laugh that somehow seems to go a step too far.
Not that it’s a deal breaker that destroys Summer Hours‘ effect as a lament for the lost luxuries of time and space. It may be more aggressive in its themes, but put it alongside films like A Christmas Tale and A Girl Cut in Two, and it seems as though there’s a strain of melancholic longing in some French film of the past few years that feels isolationist; it’s the inverse of the techno-panic that seems to pervade everyday contemporary life on this continent (not to mention other recent films by this director). I like it.

Scant parts of this review appeared in a diary piece last year at Cannes.