SUMMER HOURS is a very French movie in that it's concerned with the loss of French culture. This is something the French worry about more than most, although it's strange to see Olivier Assayas ( Irma Vep) joining the crowd.
He is probably one of the most outward-looking of French directors. He is a huge admirer of the great Taiwanese directors Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (about whom he has made a documentary). In an interview about this film, Assayas says he's always felt a bit like a Taiwanese director working in France. When he was starting out, the great Taiwanese films of the 1980s were creating huge waves in the small ponds of arthouse cinema. They resonated with him more than the works of his own countrymen.
The connection is perhaps a sense of sadness born of displacement. All Taiwanese cinema is dominated by the trauma of the country's founding. Directors such as Hou are obsessed with the effects of the exile from China on their own families. Summer Hours is about a family's dissolution but there's a wider theme, to do with the disintegration of France itself. Assayas doesn't like globalism and the film is about the displacement of modern life, the fracturing of the local
Three generations of one family gather in the rambling country house in which the older ones grew up, just outside Paris. Helene, the matriarch (Edith Scob), is turning 75. She is still a beautiful woman, which shows what she must have been like at 25 when she was the muse of her uncle, Paul Berthier, a famous artist now long dead. This was his house and it's full of great art and his memory, which Helene keeps alive. She lives there alone, save for the elderly housekeeper, Eloise (Isabelle Sadoyan), who has helped look after the family for decades.
The atmosphere of these early scenes is warm, with noisy children at play and champagne corks popping in summery light. The three small children belong to Jeremie (Jeremie Renier), the youngest of Helene's three children. He and his wife, Angela (Valerie Bonneton), live in China, where he manages a company that makes sports shoes.
The two pretty teenagers, Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing) and Pierre (Emile Berling), belong to Frederic (Charles Berling). He is an economist and author whose latest book about modern economics bores even himself. His quietly observant and affectionate wife is Lisa (Dominique Reymond).
There is also Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), the least content of the siblings. She is a designer for upscale department stores in New York. Being back in France makes her somewhat sour, partly because of unexplained tensions with her mother
