Sum­mer Hours

For a French film direc­tor, Olivi­er Assayas hasn’t been very inter­est­ed in France late­ly. His last few films have tak­en the audi­ence on cross-con­ti­nen­tal excur­sions (from Lon­don to Hong Kong in Board­ing Gate) and involved dia­logue in sev­er­al lan­guages (Eng­lish and Can­tonese in Clean). With Sum­mer Hours, how­ev­er, he has returned to the heart of mid­dle-class French life.

Fol­low­ing the death of their moth­er, three forty-some­thing sib­lings must divide her estate, a task made com­pli­cat­ed by sev­er­al valu­able antiques and some clash­ing per­son­al­i­ties. Eldest broth­er, Frédéric (Assayas reg­u­lar, Charles Berling), wants to pre­serve their mother’s lega­cy; Adri­enne (a blonde Juli­ette Binoche) is keen to unbur­den her­self of the past; while busi­ness­man Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) wants to flog it all to fund his family’s new life in Shanghai.

For Assayas, a prop is nev­er just a prop, and indeed his lat­est film’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with paint­ings and vas­es ques­tions the place of art in human lives and how we incor­po­rate the past in our present. But for all that his direc­tion lav­ish­es as much atten­tion on the minu­ti­ae of fam­i­ly inter­ac­tion as it does on Brac­que­mond glass­work, his detached eye cre­ates char­ac­ters who inter­est the intel­lect while alien­at­ing the emotions.

When Frédéric breaks down cry­ing over his mother’s death, the cam­era peers at him from the oth­er side of his car win­dow before pulling back up the road, as if retreat­ing to a polite distance.

Per­haps that’s because, in thrall to the Tai­wanese New Wave, Assayas refus­es to con­trive any dra­mat­ic con­fronta­tions. Or it might sim­ply be that his char­ac­ters’ biggest prob­lem is which price­less paint­ing to sell first, and as such they are a dif­fi­cult fam­i­ly to care about. As a result, Sum­mer Hours is undoubt­ed­ly a tri­umph of real­ism, it’s just rather a dull one.