Betraying the past, distracted by the present: Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours

When I first started watching Olivier Assayas' 2008 Summer Hours (L'heure d'ete) on Criterion DVD, I figured it was another French family drama annoyingly intent upon rubbing southern France's cultural superiority in my face, and for awhile, as children frolicked and hunted for treasure in the countryside, a matronly servant Eloise baked some exquisite chicken dish, and the family toasted each other with champagne, the film didn't disappoint. But then, something strange happened. Summer Hours is actually all about inattention, modern-day distraction, and the loss of that family heritage of art, leisure, and alfresco dinners with relatives. Curiously, the less the three characters pay attention to the drastic changes in their inheritance, the more the viewer notices what's going on, and for all of the film's beauty and balance, the implications are ominous.

The film concerns three siblings in their forties: Frederic (Charles Burling), the eldest, a professor of economics, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), the rebel designer living in the United States, and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier), who works as an engineer for Puma shoes in China. Of the three, only Frederic lives in France, and their mother Helene (Edith Scob) tries to use the occasion of her 75th birthday party to impress upon Frederic the need to think of what to do with the family estate and the various valuable works of art scattered around it. But Frederic finds the discussion morbid and asks her to change the subject. He assures her that the estate will stay in the family and the collection will remain intact. For Helene's birthday present, the family pitches in to buy her some telephones that she finds frustratingly difficult to use. In a sense, the three principals seek to replace technology for art and face-to-face interaction, and it makes sense that Helene never learns how to use the devices.

Soon enough, the family leaves in a rush, the beginning of many scenes where characters hurriedly take off in botched goodbyes. Helene pauses and walks up the steps back to her home into the darkness of some trees. She next appears in dark blue lighting, sitting resigned and exhausted. Eloise asks her if she would like any dinner, and Helene says no. Eloise points out that the grandchildren forgot the cherries (cherry imagery, a possible reference to Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, bookends the film), and Helene replies: "Their parents were distracted, thinking about their trip back. A lot of things will be leaving with me--memories, stories, stories that interest no one anymore. There's the residue--the objects. I don't want it to weigh on them," and the scene fades out.

Then, immediately, Assayas cuts to Frederic reacting to Helene's death about six months later. He consults with the local town official about her grave site, and then, driving away, pulls over to cry by himself in the car. We then see Adrienne nearly cry (I enjoyed the way the ensemble emphasis kept Binoche from playing a star. In her brightly colored mod fleece jackets, she's a scattered rebel ditz). Soon enough, the three siblings determine, against Frederic's wishes, to sell the house, and many of the works of art get donated to the Musee d'Orsee to help save on the high estate tax. As far as Helene's inheritance is concerned, everything falls away like a slow motion avalanche, leaving a desk on display in a museum, and one of the vases (which was used to hold flowers back in the house) now sealed behind glass with a bunch of parallel pieces of glassware.

Someone might wonder--what's the big deal about some works of art? Assayas is careful to never show much bias toward the values of one generation or another, but the works of art directly reflect aspects of people's lives--the dinner table outside (in a drawing) or the view from a window. Art conveys a contemplative attentiveness to one's surroundings, the beauty of nature, whereas the threesome appear too busy, too quick to answer a call on their cell phone to notice things like that. When Frederic and his wife visit the Musee d'Orsee and behold the desk in a new context of alienated glory, they are bemused by the museum aesthetics, but now their inheritance have become part of a show that crowds hurry past en route to other amusements.

Though the Musee can restore a Degas plaster sculpture that Frederic broke as a child, the items have lost their usefulness to the family. The theme is strikingly like the one in Alice Walker's 1973 short story "Everyday Use," where a family of sharecroppers in Georgia consider their family inheritance in the form of quilts, benches, and a butter churn. But while Walker allows the family to have one young representative, Maggie, embody her heritage by knowing how to quilt on her own, Assayas doesn't include anyone like that in the film. Instead, he emphasizes how the younger teenage generation, which includes Frederic's daughter Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing), have little to no interest in their grandmother's way of life. As her brother points out when their dad points to some Corot paintings, "It's from another era." The kids get to throw a party on the estate right before it's sold, but they're more interested in soccer, marijuana, rap music, and the party scene than in any old building they happen to be inhabiting.

To be fair, Sylvie does mourn for her grandmother for a moment as she picks some cherries with her delinquent boyfriend, but they blithely run off into the woods soon after. I don't think anyone in the movie fully knows what they had originally, nor are they fully aware of what they've relinquished, but the viewer can see the systematic loss of a way of life as it falls prey to modern gadgets, globalization, standardized revolt, and Americanized speed, and that's what makes the film so powerful.