Review of Summer Hours (2008) by Dave G — 18 May 2010
Really quite fascinating. Only on the surface, thankfully, is it yet another family drama in the tired recent Volvo-core genre of the discrete sufferings of the petite bourgeoisie (Rachel Getting Married, Old Joy, Pieces of April, Margot at the Wedding, Wendy and Lucy, A Christmas Tale, etc.). It's really a movie about the life of objects, and about objects as living things. (It would make a nice cinematic companion piece to Walter Benjamin's essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction).
The objects that inhabit the house have more life, history, and humanity than the family that divvies and sells them. The family enters the real narrative only in negative: they show signs of humanity in the small moments when they recognize, and mourn, the loss of their own humanity as displayed in the dead, abandoned house and its furnishings.
In the end, the only human in the film is the live-in maid, the house's true inhabitant--and a soon to be extinct species, like relics of the dead world that it represents: old Europe, the family, the nation, roots and, more generally, the natural world.
This review of Summer Hours (2008) was written by Dave G on 18 May 2010.
Summer Hours has generally received positive reviews.
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