Summer Hours

I finally got to see Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours last night, which means I'm now free to more than glance at the mountain of ecstatic press the film has garnered since its first international screenings over a year ago.

The first review I read was Frédéric Bonnaud's in Film Comment, from which I had already gleaned some pretty tantalizing bits, like the last line, used in some of the film's publicity materials: "Assayas invokes ... the supreme figure of French cinema: none other than Jean Renoir." This is a true statement, and in more ways than Bonnaud may intend it to be. Yes, as Bonnaud says, the film's pastoral opening and finale resonate with Renoir's personal history and, maybe more significantly, with one of his lovliest, most obviously personal films, A Day In The Country.

But some of what Bonnaud sees in Summer Hours confuses me. He rightly observes that one of the film's greatest strengths is its sense of emanating from the perspective of the house and objets d'art that constitute the inheritance at the heart of the story. But is it really obvious that the properties being dispersed by the three siblings in the film "view" them with anything like reproach? I'm more inclined to interpret the "gaze" of the family home and art collection as infused with a deep empathy for the difficult position in which its owners find themselves, as they divest themselves of their heirlooms not out of simple greed, but of resigned expediency. The empathy may be tinged with regret, but the objects hardly, I think, "seem to admonish the characters for their betrayal and brutality." Even the character, Frédéric, with the most legitimate claim to having been betrayed by his brother and sister refuses to admonish them. It's in this atmosphere of profound compassion that the film most sublimely evokes Renoir.