Two films, two days, two revered European filmmakers presenting work that, in one way or another, reps a return. Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours screened in the market without the Cannes Film Festival’s official kiss on the cheek, but even without that critical imprimatur, it’s nonetheless one the finest features I’ve seen this year, a return to classicism of a sort for Assayas (in the press notes, he admits that he sought to return to the stylistic concerns and working method of his Late August, Early September era) and the kind of thoughtful French film designed for adults for which there seems to longer be a U.S. market (IFC bought it anyway). Of Time and the City, Terrence Davies’ first film in eight years after the commercially unsuccessful artistic triumph of The House of Mirth, is a plain return to work. Both movies are about memory, about place, and a taking stock of the relationship between the two that happens in mid-life.
France, the film tracks a year in the lives of the family attached to the house on that land, as well as their various states of attachment to the objects insiThe title of the Assayas film is less evocative of its milieu than of its driving metaphor and climactic mood. Beginning and ending with two very different parties in and around the same sprawling estate in Ile dede. Tonal changes match the seasons. When we first meet Helene Berthier, her adult children and teenage grandchildren have come from all corners of the globe to celebrate her 75th birthday. Helene is in a maudlin, morbid mood, even though she looks and acts as though she’s in the early September of her years (excuse the totally intended Assayas pun) rather than at the end of her biological calendar. This is why it’s such a shock when, a few months later, Helene suddenly dies. The film shifts into a chilly fall/winter zone as siblings Frederick, Adrienne and Jeremie bicker over what to do with the house and the many museum-worth paintings and antiques inside. That process forces Frederick in particular to confront what it means to assign memories to things, as his siblings, both of whom have long left France and have started new lives in far-flung corners of the world, seek to cavalierly sell or donate most of their mothers things. Ultimately, the once-dire situation lightens. Spring quickly gives way to summer’s sluggish glow as Frederick’s teenage daughter finds at the estate a fleeting moment of muggy, melancholic idyll.
Summer Hours was initially motivated by a project sponsored by the Musee d’Orsay, which is one thing the film has in common with Hou Hsiao-Hsien.’s The Flight of the Red Balloon. It’s not the only thing. Both are, in their own ways, contemplations of a French family dealing with the past floating away; in both, both comfort and anxiety come from the fact that past and purpose live on in classic works of French art.
And, of course, both films co-star Juliette Binoche. She’s really getting better with age, no? Here, as in Balloon, she’s blonde, and it’s an amazing look for her, mostly because it’s … off. Crazy, wrong. Hot. In Assayas’ film, she’s a little less frazzled than in Hsien’s––playing a famous designer who has essentially renounced her cultural and familiaal heritage in order to enjoy art stardom in the historically oblivious global theme park that is contemporary New York, Binoche almost swaggers. She isn’t given much to do beyond that swagger, beyond standing in for an indifference to the past, but there are few international stars right now who do nothing better.
A hop across the Channel and downgrade in aesthetic scale brings us to Of Tme and the City, which works themes similar to those driving Summer Hours, but with a more directly personal bent. Commissioned by the city of Liverpool in honor of their selection as Europe’s Cultural Capital for 2008, City combines yellowed 16 mm film with crisp, purple-infused HD to demonstrate his hometown’s evolution. Davies sets these images to carefully selected opera swells and vocal melancholy courtesy of Peggy Lee; as the film’s narrator, he sets the tone for the endeavor as a whole by contrasting personal reflections with quotes from James Joyce, TS Eliot, and other cultural giants.
Davies’ reflections on the city itself are less illuminating than the personal confessions the city inspires. In the best of the recurring threads, he connects his alternate guilt and pride over his lack of belief in God to the bastardization of religious imagery in modern nightclubs, in mid-century Christmas films. He admits that he fears the wrath of God, but he pronounces it in extreme air quotes––”roth of gawwwd.” “We had hoped for paradise,” Davies laments in consideration of the world around him. “We got the anus mundi.”
More than anything, it feels like a city symphony film, an update on The Man With the Movie Camera, After Irony. Davies takes Dziga Vertov as a template, and then takes into account history both personal and social, transmitting both with the dryest of British wit. As far as recent place-based diary film materpieces go, it’s not quite My Winnipeg, but there’s some lovely stuff here.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth