Olivier Assayas’s wise, wistful film about moving forward. By STEVE GARDEN.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS’s new film, Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) starts with a celebration. Frederic (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) converge on the art-filled family home with their partners and children to celebrate the 75th birthday of their mother, Helene (Edith Scob). Once the home of Helene’s uncle (a respected artist long departed, for whom she was a muse – and possibly more besides), the house is one of many ‘possessions’ that become virtual characters in this intriguing meditation on values and dissolution (aesthetic, moral, economic, and ultimately life itself). Just as summer gives way to autumn, Summer Hours slowly reveals the world as a place that Helene’s uncle could never have imagined. The opening shot of young people running carefree around the family home is returned to at the end of the film to poignant effect.

Completed before the financial downturn, the film nevertheless has much to say about the economic rationalism (in other words, greed) that led to the current crisis. Assayas has always been critical of the ‘trickle-up’ effect of globalism, and uses the opportunity of contributing to the recent series of films commissioned by the Musee d’Orsay to take a swing at (among other things) the implicit complicity of the custodians of public art. Assayas suggests that the dissolution of family, culture, heritage and nationhood – a meaningful sense of place and connection for future generations – is seriously at stake. And yet, Summer Hours is by no means dour or depressing (for the most part it’s very warm and engaging), but as a depiction of the cynical potential of power and wealth (a fact that surely none of us can now dispute), it is a sobering and timely film. Like L’eau froide, Irma Vep and Late August Early September, Summer Hours is one of Assayas’s more restrained, thoughtful and consequently (in my view) most substantial films.

See also:
» Fraught Reunions: Summer Hours, A Christmas Tale