Review of Summer Hours (2008) by Jason R — 01 Apr 2009

While I loved this film from its opening frames to its elegant denouement, I kept wondering if there wasn't a streak of cultural conservatism running through it. As the family matriarch nears her death, her adult children are mostly on the verge of leaving France behind forever, one to the U.

S. and the other to China. A third sibling is intent on staying, but he also seems burdened by the prospect. The film gives voice to the idea that France has sacrificed some of its identity in the pursuit of certain American ideals, the importance of capital being chief among them.

But it also suggests that maintaining some sense of French (mostly Parisian) culture comes at the cost of stasis (or the political definition of conservatism, a word that is essentially, if uncomfortably, synonymous with "tradition").

Assayas' camera unconventionally lingers on objects--paintings, vases, pieces of furniture--but the technique is thematically linked to the family's role in the preservation of a great French painter's oeuvre (you know you're watching a French film when you hear someone actually use that word), who also happens to be a member of the family.

One of the most exhilarating scenes in the film is a diversion through the Musee d'Orsay, a moment in which Assayas gives his camera an agenda functionally separate from that of advancing the narrative.

But the sequence also ends with the suggestion that France's cultural heritage is no match for the distractions of postmodern, global life. I've used up this entire review on this question for this reason: I thought the end of the film resoundingly answered my nagging questions in the negative.

The family house is on the auction block and the teenaged grand kids throw a kick ass house party as a kind of unintentional wake, though most of the revelers could care less about the house's history.

If Assayas had given us any reason to distrust these kids, then I'd say the film is kind of pernicious; but he doesn't. Rather, we get an exuberant vision of youth, and a touching awareness on the part of the granddaughter that it means something to lose the house and the history it evokes.

Which is why I don't understand The Onion's description of the film's conclusion as "quietly devastating." I found it quietly life-affirming. Is there any chance these two are, or can be, the same thing?