All things must pass: Summer Hours

It is in part a story about things of weight, a property, a house, the objects amassed inside it, some of which are cultural artifacts of immense value, some purely functional yet shot through with significance for those who’ve handled them, enjoyed them, disliked them, known them in some way. It’s about, to paraphrase one of the characters, the residue of a life with its memories and its secrets. It’s about the burden of inheritance. An elderly woman leaves her three adult children with items to put in order—that pretty much the gist of the story here. But it says a lot about Summer Hours (L’heure d’été) that it both opens and closes with children scampering through the woods, whether in the midst of a treasure hunt or traipsing along the bridge to adulthood, on the cusp of some tender new sensual awakening. The presence of youth along its perimeter imbues this fundamentally adult tale with unmistakable lightness, as do the gliding camerawork and the naturalness of the marvelous cast’s collective presence. Such lightness is finally the only method of approaching material so brimming with emotional complexity.

Olivier Assayas is a filmmaker of special dexterity. He makes films that are boldly audacious and films that are quietly arresting, films that are international and cool and films that are local and intimate. Irma Vep and demonlover roughly fall into the former category, Summer Hours very much into the latter. Prompted in part by a commission from the Musee d’Orsay—who previously produced Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon—the siblings at its centre are diasporic enough to reflect Assayas’ global sensibility, but the setting and the themes are thoroughly invested in home and heritage. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is an economist living in Paris with his family. He’s just published an iconoclastic book yet his instincts are firmly rooted in tradition, in what can be passed from one generation to another. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) by contrast is a designer who favours bright colours and crisp modern simplicity. She lives in New York (and is so entrenched in Americaness she’s actually marrying Clint Eastwood’s son). Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) has roamed the farthest of the three, working as a supervisor for Puma in China and is now in the costly process of moving his wife and three kids there to start a new life. When the film opens the siblings share a rare reunion with their mother Hélène (Edith Scob) to celebrate her 75th birthday. In the midst of the gathering Hélène will take Frédéric aside to go over some of her house’s inventory for the umpteenth time, the Corot paintings and Louis Majorelle desk, and the notebooks and sketches of great uncle Paul Berthier, whose work is still sought after and who may or may not have had an affair with Hélène decades ago. Soon enough Hélène will be gone and all this “bric-a-brac from another era” (her words) will, much to Frédéric’s chagrin, have to be sold off. Life goes on.

The eloquence of Summer Hours comes from the way Assayas, along with his cast and crew—including regular ace cinematographer Eric Gauthier—convey this sense of life’s hopelessly forward movement, without a trace of theatrics yet flowing with overwhelming emotion. Even if your family bears not the slightest resemblance to this one their negotiations and disappointments and sudden recoveries will resonate, not through any awkward straining toward making things “universal” but rather through its very particularity. Each character is so fully drawn as to feel warmly recognizable before they even say much. In that first scene with the treasure hunt in the woods surrounding Hélène’s house a blank piece of paper is found. One of the kids correctly guesses that the paper holds a clue but that the clue’s written in invisible ink. Watching Summer Hours the second time I had to smile at this very elegant little prelude to what’s to come, a chronicle of managing the residue of the past where the secret message this residue carries waits invisibly for the characters to decipher and digest. It says: just take a deep breath, and let go.

Portrait in latex: Irma Vep beguiles anew on DVD

Early into production on his feature film version of Louis Feuillade’s beloved silent serial Les Vampires, René (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is already consumed by doubts. While screening rushes he sits burrowed under layers of clothes, hawk-like and festering, finally rising to leave without a word. Only when a crewmember pleads for appraisal does he offer a gut searing “It sucks!,” or however they say it sucks in French. Late that same night, following a domestic altercation sufficiently inflamed to summon the Paris gendarme, with pharmaceutically aided calmness René reassesses the project with its star Maggie (Maggie Cheung). She tries to reassure him things are going well, that the film they’re making will be fun, that it possesses real feeling. “I feel nothing,” René flatly declares with epitomic, categorical French renvoi. Only one thing can redeem the whole fiasco, he says, only one thing sustains his interest, and it’s her. Maggie Cheung. His imported Irma Vep, his muse, and the object of universal desire within his camp.

Same goes for Olivier Assayas. Drawn in by “the radiance she exuded through her beauty and sovereignty,” he made Irma Vep (1996), the filmic host for René’s doomed remake, as both a study of persona and a love letter to a genuine star—and he wrote the above quoted homage before Cheung became his wife. Such a guiding principal, a cinema of transcendent fascination with feminine image and being, aligns Irma Vep with the French New Wave and Jean-Luc Godard’s celluloid adoration of Anna Karina, and with the cinema’s earliest feats of actress-director collaborations, such as those of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. This is very much in keeping with Assayas’ approach overall, flush as it is with the buzzy life of film sets, with its effervescent brio, with Assayas’ willingness to invoke and reinvent aspects of the movies in order to find his own voice. Irma Vep is among the most pleasurable works of cinephile cinema, and the praise Cheung offers to René’s Vampires should be applied here with the fullest vigor: its fun, and it has feeling. And it’s newly released in a handsomely packaged DVD from Zeitgeist.

Les Vampires (1915) was a delirious fantasy concerning a gang of master criminals, one of which, Irma Vep—an anagram for vampire—slips through Paris in impossibly sexy faux ninja gear. Irma Vep, by contrast, is not fantasy so much as an observational tale in which the busy banality of work, with its stops and starts, its gossip and arguments, is gradually enmeshed with film-induced fantasy. Cheung is fitted for her role in a sex shop, the latex livery so enveloping her figure that Zoé, the film’s costumer (Nathalie Richard), is already harboring her own fantasies of seducing the star. There’s something alchemical in the contact of the latex with Cheung’s flesh, to the degree where, in the film’s most strange and beguiling sequence, the actress dons her costume and begins to inhabit her character in the real world of her hotel. She infiltrates the room of a naked woman (Armenian-Canadian actress Arsinée Khanjian) embroiled in a long-distance phone call and steals a dazzlingly bejeweled necklace. The soundscape is sublime, the soft squeak of the latex folds, the tinkly icicle rattle of the necklace being swiped from the marble vanity. The imagery is curious in its selection, with Assayas darting in for close-ups of Khanjian’s painted toenails, as though the best way to emphasize such flagrant nudity is to fixate on the feet. It ends upon a rainy rooftop, with Cheung disposing of her swag in gauzy images composed like a superhero comic. And then its over, this dream or fugue or closet criminal caper—we never know for sure which—and we’re back to the business of watching a movie fall apart.

Assayas, collaborating beautifully here with cinematographer Eric Gautier, makes the twin realities of Irma Vep feel very much of a piece. His handheld camera always prowling through spaces and across faces, he is a director of unusual assurance when simply capturing people conversing, eating, drinking or goofing around, routinely ending scenes at idiosyncratic moments, such as Zoé’s donning of a dominatrix mask with zipped up orifices while attempting to exhale a lungful of smoke. Smoking itself feels like a theme here, or at least essential to the film’s irreverent lampooning of Frenchness, of sourness, petty tirades and impassioned gloom, bad attitudes played up for a good time. Despite a lovely ride on the back of Zoé’s motorbike—to the sounds of Ali Farka Touré—and her almost attending a rave, Cheung’s tour of Paris is largely limited to the confines of the French film industry, yet for us viewers it becomes a world of constant small surprises, where everyone’s there out of love for the art—but what kind of love, what kind of art, that’s something of infinitesimal and often oppositional variation.

So one final variation, then. Assayas winds things down by winding our imaginations up. Les Vampires is handed over to another director, the foreign star dismissed in favour of homegrown talent. But Cheung’s Irma lives in a sudden leap into the scratchy abstract. The last images render her both semi-obliterated and reconceived in a crazy closing collage. Fantasy is pushed back into the celluloid fantastical. Think of it as a parting gift. Or as a prompt to start the whole thing over.