I'm fairly certain I wasn't ready to watch Summer Hours (Criterion, 20 April) until now, and am very glad that I didn't see it in the winter that bridged 2008 and 2009, during which time it was at the top of various friends' recommendation lists. Without knowing more than "it's this wonderful new French film from the director of demonlover", I knew I would give it a watch at some point.
My world had been broken apart and reconfigured by my father having a devastating stroke in December of 2008. I missed a lot of movies (and a lot of life) during that time. Summer Hours would have deepened the out-of-body numbness that filled so many months for me. The feeling of profound loss, the stories left untold, and the pangs of regret brought a lot back (and quite vividly) while watching Hours last week. My father didn't die, but he's lost the ability to speak and walk, and combined with antidepressant medication, he's nothing like the man I've loved and hated in various proportions throughout my life. Most of him is dead, and the ghost that remains is as mute as the one that haunts most of Assayas' movie: a lifetime of memories trapped behind an invisible barrier.
To say that the movie is about the process of where possessions go after someone dies gives away nothing, as the family matriarch sets this up for us early on. There are no tense twists to give away or sacred secrets to spoil in Olivier Assayas' hushed ode to the process of life moving on after death. At its heart, Hours is about how the trivial, subjectively important things are what really hold meaning in life, like Rosebud does to Charles Foster Kane.
At one point, one of the sons discovers an artifact that very well could have been the last thing his mother wrote, and it wrecked me. While moving from an apartment into a house recently, I uncovered the last thing my father hand-wrote to me, and it was similarly unimportant in the grand scheme: dashed off in a hurry and certainly immediately forgotten by the author. It stopped me cold as a simple post-it note stopped Frederic (Charles Berling) as he went through his mother Helene's (Edith Scob) things.
This is not a movie that you leave playing in the background as you work whether you've watched it once or twenty times. The film works and grows on you as it progresses, or your lack of life experience refuses you the ability to connect with it. You don't need the upper middle-class (by American standards) background shared by the principals here, but you do need the perspective of what is lost as people pass on and their artifacts lose meaning. The acting is done by a marvelous ensemble deserving recognition as a whole, though I will mention that I didn't initially recognize Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) as having also played the cracked-out husband from Lorna's Silence.
The final sequence touches on the generational tragedy in one abrupt moment of clarity for one of the youngest in the family. The moment is equal parts devastating and rejuvenating, and it comes as a button to one of the most masterfully-choreographed party sequences I've seen in years. Summer Hours earns its place as an indelible memory you have of someone else's life because it so stunningly extracts the essence of things we all go through.
Kent Jones' essay in the included booklet is as much an appreciation of Assayas' entire career as it is this one movie. As always, there's no reason to read it until you've seen the film. The half hour interview with Assayas, shot exclusively for Criterion, reveals Assayas' love of the films of Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, which intimately inform his writing. The booklet adds his fascination with the films of Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, which Assayas wrote about for Cahiers du cinema.
Holdover extras from the MK2 French DVD are a half-hour behind the scenes piece that includes interviews with the cast and crew, and an hour-long doc (Inventory) about the pieces used on loan from the Musee d'Orsay and how a defunct project for them lead to the making of Summer Hours. The Blu-ray can be pre-ordered at Amazon for $29.99. The DVD is the same price, and both are available next Tuesday.