I chose to see ‘L’heure d’ete‘ (film released in the English space with the title ‘Summer Hours’) especially for Juliette Binoche, an actress I greatly appreciate, and for director Olivier Assayas. Binoche does not have as consistent a role in this film as I had hoped, but the film, a family drama presented from an original point of view, has enough interesting moments to be worth watching.
The story in the film takes place mostly in a villa located somewhere, in the country, in France, and even when not in the frame, this villa is the main subject. In the opening scene, the mother of the family celebrates her 74th birthday, but she feels that she will not reach the 75th anniversary. She tries to open with her children a conversation about inheritance, which includes many art objects related to the personality of her uncle, a great painter, who died many years before. Only one of the two brothers (Charles Berling) and a sister would be interested in keeping the family home for the future generations, the other brother and sister (Juliette Binoche) live away from France and their lives are less related to family or inheritance. When the expected death happens, everything begins to crumble. The centrifugal forces of life prove stronger than family ties, than the once dominant personality of the artist giving the family name its fame, than the mother’s last wishes.
Olivier Assayas chooses to use minimalist means, based on smart dialogs, on excellent performances of the actors (among whom Charles Berling steps ahead in the lead role of the big brother) and on the setting that shows the gradual evolution of the house that seems to mirror the family’s disintegration. From what was at the beginning of the film a family domain and an artist’s house, closing between its walls the history of a family and the personality of a great painter, will be left at the end the almost empty rooms and the walls awaiting the restoration that will be decided by the future owners. Only nature around it remains the same. The film is an elegy of an epoch and lifestyle that cannot resist to modernity and a parable that makes us think about the fragility of our cultural landmarks in the absence of family cohesion. Paintings, furniture, art objects can be found partly in museums, but taken out of context they seem devoid of soul, or ‘prisoners’ as one of the characters puts it. Forgetting is often the result of our actions.