L'heure d'été

Of things and men

Olivier Assayas frequently makes films about people, who are struck in the past. In Carlos, the film director has shown an old and physically wasted terrorist, who imagined that he is still the number one threat. Accordingly, in Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas portrayed the French cinema, hopelessly struck in the «nouvelle vague» paradigm.

Summer Hours shows the influence of globalization on a family and the «lifecycle» of family things from important items to lifeless museum objects. Olivier Assayas divides the film by «acts», separated by black screen. In the «premier act», the family is centered around a pariah – 75 year old Helene, but her death breaks down the link and for the rest of the film we see the fate of an inheritance.

The film resembles The Cherry Orchard (a play by Anton Chekhov). As in the play, the «main hero» is an old mansion which symbolizes the Old France. The mansion is turned into the shrine of a famous old painter by his niece Helen. Nevertheless, she understands that her children – Frederick, Jeremy and Adrienne – cannot go on living in the past as her. Helen tries to explain it to her son Frederick – the only child who stays in France – but he doesn’t want to listen.

The main theme of Summer Hours is a history of things; their emotional meaning for people. Every character has a certain thing, which has its own emotional value. This value is destroyed by the harsh reality in a form of taxes, expenses and generational values. The dream of Frederick of keeping the mansion as a «Shrine for the Past» is destroyed by a simple voting – Jeremy and Adrienne are not interested into frozen past. Accordingly, a lot of family things would end up as a faceless museum items.

Olivier Assayas has made Summer Hours as a simple life history. He doesn’t dramatize or sentimentalize. But despite the «simpleness» the film is full of sadness and melancholy for the past. Despite all of that, the file must go on.

8/10