A family summer house is a factory of memories. Those hours in June, July, August when the familia comes together, once a year, are usually the most vivid, most memorable and sometimes most hurtful hours in the year. These hours define the way the past year was and determine what we should aim for in the year ahead. They are engraved in our minds, they are painted on our pictures. For me personally, the summer hours are much more defining then the resolutions we sometimes aim to take on December 31 each year. They cannot compare to the busy times during the year, to the office life, to the travels that take us to exotic lands but not to our summer house. Very appropriately, I write this entry in my summer house, overlooking the Adriatic Sea (exact location purposely not disclosed) and am brought back to think again about Assayas' latest french family drama "Summer Hours". The plot is fairly simple: a decent sized family meets every summer at a charming french maison de campagne, the grandmother is the family keeper, the glue that holds everyone together and also the keeper of all the secrets, the first generation (her children) is composed of two brothers and one sister (a blonde Juliette Binoche), all living at three corners of the world at this time (Asia, France, USA). They all meet every year. Sit around the table, open presents, celebrate birthdays, laugh, frustrate each other, chase the new generation kids around the lawn. There is one scene that sticks, it's the scene where the three siblings, together with their families and kids (only the sister is still unmarried) leave the house, in a hurried manner, noise everywhere. And once the cars move further away and the goodbye waves have been made, there is this great beauty you see around the family garden, yet with only the grandmother to live in it. Silence and green beauty and walking up the stairs alone after the children have gone. "The past, and the present's (dis) connection to it, is the central concern of Assayas's family drama". The mother, sensing that there is a generation turnaround ahead, pulls aside Frederic, the only sibling still living in France, to have the unpleasant conversation about the family estate and the destiny of the precious pieces of art. Seems that he hurts the most, first because he cannot keep the house that means more to him than the other siblings, and second because he lives every moment with a stronger connection to the past that he is going to have to cultivate in Musee d'Orsay. Here, I will borrow Roger Ebert's words to describe one of the essenses of this picture: "What happens is that the film builds its emotional power by stealth, indirectly, refusing to be a tearjerker, always realistic, and yet observing how very sad it is to see a large part of your life disappear. " And the end, with an open landscape, with a member of the young, new generation almost dancing in the air, jumping through stone walls,....well, it makes you think about the revolutions of family life...
