Two takes on French families. By TIM WONG.

IMPROBABLY French, Summer Hours and A Christmas Tale mine a delicate commercial sensibility without ever compromising the authorship of their ace filmmakers. Strongly in favour of narrative and good looks, both are also bright, handsome examples of art cinema, tailor-made for a film festival determined to fight its way through economic gloom. The programme notes will shamelessly flog the attractions of Juliette Binoche, Catherine Deneuve, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly alumni (Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny), but who gives? Last year’s sublime Flight of the Red Balloon drew numbers (and big venues) on the back of Binoche’s ubiquity alone, even if many in attendance seemed oblivious to the greatness of Hou Hsiao-hsien. Audiences are unlikely to miss the point this time around though, given the universal experience in which each film magically engages.

Taking its cue from Hou’s ethereal Musée d’Orsay commission, Summer Hours retains a lightness of being designed at once to complement and belie its generational themes of heritage and succession. So rather than dwell heavily on grief, reconciliation, or the particulars of a family inheritance (a gorgeous house and its extraordinary contents), director Olivier Assayas moves us steadily, if not seasonally, through the aftermath of a matriarch’s death (Edith Scob), arriving at a conclusion which brings proceedings full circle. Binoche, Jeremie Renier and Charles Berling play the bereaved siblings evenly and with a shortage of melodrama – their feelings seem secondary in a film that takes great pleasure in photographing objects of art and the spaces they inhabit. Assayas’s most centred film to date may lack the ragged edge and life force of his best work (Irma Vep), but there’s something to be said for coming back down to earth. For a filmmaker whose recent intercontinental output has felt largely impersonal and estranged, Summer Hours is a fine homecoming.

LESS EDIFYING, but more entertaining, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale riffs the American Holiday Movie, and gets away with it. Centred on a fraught clan gathering over the yuletide period – the material of stocking fillers like Home for the Holidays and The Family Stone, it would seem – this mid-winter concoction juggles its shamelessly self-obsessed characters, drunken escapades, and unresolved issues with aplomb. Orchestrating these collisions amongst some familiar preoccupations – terminal illness, hip-hop, Emmanuelle Devos – Desplechin can’t claim to distil family in the way Summer Hours does so effortlessly, for his film is too self-conscious of its dysfunction, and therefore too catchy for its own good. Brisk, dexterous direction is Desplechin’s speciality though, and his restless style recalls the manic-depressive melodrama of Kings and Queen – a similarly convoluted life lesson (in the best sense) that also regularly threatened to crash and burn. Not quite the precarious (and in my view, superior) viewing experience of that film, A Christmas Tale nevertheless crams a lot into its hectic schedule, not in the least of which, a sexy French ensemble cast. Personal preference for risk-taking aside, the uncomplicated yet chaotic storytelling of Desplechin’s appealing film is exactly what the doctor ordered for a festival which, more than ever, needs its box office receipts to spell Christmas in July.

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» Passing On: Summer Hours