Summer Hours

365 Films

Entry #98

Summer Hours (2008)

Directed by Olivier Assayas

I don’t think there is a director working today who can capture movement quite like Olivier Assayas.  This skill is put to superlative execution in his 2008 family-drama, Summer Hours.  I knew very little of Mr. Assayas’ work before this film, for it was the first one of his I actually saw.  Instead, I had vague memories of trailers for the two techno-thrillers he made prior to this, Boarding Gate and Demonlover.  To be brutally honest, both looked like fresh off the shelf direct to DVD material but if I may offer a lesson to be learned by my ignorance, it is to never judge a film by its trailer.  Granted, I still haven’t seen Boarding Gate or Demonlover but going off of Assayas’ collective output since, which includes, Summer Hours, Carlos, and the now in theaters Something in the Air, I feel as though my prejudice will once again be proven unfounded.  Such is the attitude I had going into Summer Hours as I sank into my spring-loaded seat in the Laemmle Encino theater where it was playing, another lesson borne of ignorance, sometimes no expectations are the best kind of expectations to have.  As the next hour and forty-three minutes unspooled, I was completely transported.  Not to a magical realm or a mystical portal, but to that immaculate region where cinema and memory collide to produce a truly shared evocation of humanity.  Summer Hours concerns a trio of adult siblings dealing with the recent death of their Mother and the subsequent decisions that must be made regarding the family estate and the highly desirable collection of artworks contained therein.  It would be enough for the film merely to address the issues of French national identity, the conflict between public and private displays of art, and the incredibly complex relationships between adult siblings.  All of these are elements that are rarely handled well in cinema and can lead to a lot of leaden bullet point dialogue or an orgy of melodramatic relationship climaxes.  Assayas makes a ballet out of his dialogue (hence his agility with movement) and renders each character with the resultant depth and humanity to modulate these intellectual abstractions to the realm of the instinctual.  To watch Summer Hours is to engage with people and ideas, making the acceptance of one part and parcel with the other.  It’s an extremely masterful piece of writing and directing.  With that being said, the main issue I would like to address in regards to this film is an entirely personal one for me.  It could be that I’m just looking for an explanation as to why I get so choked up every time I watch it but there is a reason we have specific memories, right?  It’s hard for me to watch this film and not think about the move my family made from the house in which we spent the better part of ten years.  It’s a very strange sensation to leave the house where you ostensibly formed your being and it is difficult to describe only because each experience is so specific to each person.  Granted, my family’s situation is entirely different from the one faced in Summer Hours (there was no mountain of valuable art work to sort through unless you discount our collection of hand-made pottery from 1^st grade art class) but I fail to bring to mind another film that so elegantly and poetically captures the utter despair that comes from looking at a barren room after everything has been packed up and boxed for a move.  What was once filled with clutter and mess has now been rendered back to its original state: cold and lifeless.  It may just be a collection of plywood and brick (or whatever houses are made of) and at the end of the day, a thing.  That doesn’t make it any easier to let go of, regardless of how irrational it is to hold on to it.  I’ll always be grateful to Summer Hours for not only helping me navigate through images and ideas from my own life (and life in general), but also introducing me to a truly great filmmaker.