L’Heure d’été (2008) - film review

One summer, three successful forty-something siblings return to their family home in the country to celebrate the 75th birthday of their mother, Hélène Berthier.  Frédéric is a professor at a Paris university, Adrienne is a designer based in New York and Jérémie is a go-getting businessman working for a company in Shanghai.  Hélène has dedicated her life to promoting and preserving the work of her uncle, the renowned painter Paul Berthier.  When she dies a few months later, her three descendants have a difficult task facing up to their past and each other in order to ensure that her last wishes are respected...

The relationship between art and culture may seem an odd subject for a film but it is this which is at the heart of Olivier Assayas’s latest drama, a beguiling meditation (with some Chekhovian undertones) on how we, as individuals and as a society, relate to objets d’art.  For some, such objects are cherished for their nostalgia value; some may value them only for their financial worth; others may have no feelings for them whatsoever.  Assayas’s thoughtful drama concerns three siblings whose differing attitudes to the objects they inherit from their mother result in family disharmony, in a way that reveals some startling differences in their characters and their attitudes to life.

As the title implies, the film is also a sobering reflection on the transience of all things, reminding us that the precious moments that we snatch from the fabric of eternity are moments that are lived all too briefly.  Too soon are these impressions of life stolen from us, recast as vague memories that fade too quickly.  This notion of transience is reinforced by the sunny impressionistic style of cinematography, the bright dappled light and palate of intense greens evoking the work of painters such as Monet and Renoir.

L’Heure d’été is a beautifully composed film, celebrating not lamenting the sweet brevity of life, yet there are also moments of intense irony and poignancy along the way.  The contrast across the different generations is particularly striking and brings a subtly tragic dimension to the drama.  For the older characters, the treasured family heirlooms are a sad reminder of their own mortality.  For the younger characters, they are merely relics of a bygone age, valued only for what they will fetch at auction.  How appropriate that the film should end with the family home stripped of its priceless antiques, overrun with noisy youngsters who have no need of such pointless trinkets, so content are they just to live every moment of their lives in the present.  It is a vision of Utopia that marks the death of art, for a society which lives exclusively in the present (as ours increasingly does) can have no need of things that tie it to the past.

L’Heure d’été was originally conceived as a short film, one of four films to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Musée d’Orsay in 2006.  When the project fell though, director Olivier Assayas gradually developed his ideas into a full-length film and was fortunate to have the cooperation of the Musée d’Orsay in the making of the film.  Assayas was equally fortunate to be able to assemble such a stunning cast, which includes Juliette Binoche, virtually unrecognisable as a feisty blonde, Charles Berling – the star of the director’s previous Les Destinées sentimentales (2000) - and Jérémie Renier, arguably the hottest young actor in France today.  For some, the languorous pace of this film may be a turn off, but for those who like their dramas to be slow-moving and contemplative it is a sure-fire winner.  Without a doubt, this is Olivier Assayas’s most captivating film to date.

© James Travers 2010

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