Summer Hours (2008)

I must confess I have had a rather prejudiced (non-)relation to the films of Olivier Assayas. Bourgeois prattling about love in a setting of some idyllic French countryside estate. Even though Summer Hours may correspond to that image to some extent (yes, it takes place in a gorgeous French summerhouse and yes the people in the film are all unabashedly upper-middle class), I was also a bit enchanted by it, regardless of my previous preconceptions. At best, the film resembles the best work of Rohmer, films in which every human encounter may have something unexpected in store and where human relations are seen both under the aspect of the history they carry with them and the way people constantly related to their pasts by relating to the present. Summer hours opens with a party. Helene turns 75 and her children and grandchildren have come to her house in the countryside to celebrate. She wants to settle the business of the estate and how it is to be managed when she is dead. The house contains numberless things and one of the finest aspect of the film is how it delves into diverse attitudes to possessions. The house once belonged to a fairly famous painter. We learn that there are things there that are valuable because they have a market value. Other things, knick-knacks, vases and such, have a personal history, and the family members are attached to these belongings. The mother dies, and now the grown children, some of which live abroad, have to sort out how all of these things, including the house, are to be disposed of.

The film ends beautifully with a sudden shift of attention. The grandchildren are having a party one last time in the house. We now see the house and the things that the different generations have collected, valued or neglected, from a fresh point of view. Surprisingly, this new entry into the history of the house does not take away the feeling of nostalgia, that was not always there before in this languidly told story that most of all carried an atmosphere of matter-of-factness, but rather brings it to the fore but showing that also these young folks have an attachment of their own, different from their parents', to the house and its stories.