Action movies

A boy, working at a garage, does a favour for an elderly woman, and steals her wallet. A young woman discovers she’s going to lose her factory job and physically assaults her employer in protest. In both cases the characters are followed by the camera as though in hot pursuit—the word “dogged” always comes to mind. The camera is handheld but there’s no phony, pseudo-documentary shakiness. The décors and mise en scène are unadorned as can be, the close-ups often bracingly tight and off-kilter. Yet there is a sense of masterful control to how every moment unfolds, and the result is moment-to-moment riveting. The characters always have tasks, and the stakes are high.

The boy, Igor (Jérémie Renier), has been pulled out of school to work at the garage, but his father (Olivier Gourmet) winds up pulling him out of the garage too, so that he can focus his energies on assisting him with the maintenance of illegal migrant workers, one of whom falls prey to an accident and before perishing asks Igor to make him a promise, one which breaks through the boy’s preternatural cynicism. The girl, Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne), lives with her alcoholic mother in a trailer and is desperate to improve her situation, to have a normal life, above all, a job, something she seeks with a tremendous fierceness. Her energy seems uncontainable: in a single breathless sequence, we see her confront her mother’s lover, steal the bottle he’s brought along with him, smash the bottle, get chased by the boyfriend through the trailer park, then spot a guy on a dirt bike, tackle him to the ground and start to wrestle. It’s almost an action movie.

But let me clarify: the boy and the girl are in two different movies, the first being La promesse, the second Rosetta. But these films are connected by a strict yet liberating formal, narrative and, yes, moral rigour of the highest order. These films, the first made in 1996, the second in 1999, both new on DVD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, represent a genuine revelation, not only for Belgium’s fraternal filmmaking collaborators Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who had made documentaries before producing two disappointing fiction films and needed to find a new, essentially sui generis way of working, but for cinema itself: they launched a body of work both radical and humble, austere and galvanizing. Each movie begins in media res, offers no exposition, no score, nothing beyond the diegetic; each demonstrates relationships only through action, and follows its protagonist with a rough and tumble loyalty that ultimately feels like the closest thing to true, deeper love that the movies can give us. The plights of Igor and of Rosetta are indeed dire, but the last thing these films want is to wallow in pity, and the stunning lead performances do nothing to ingratiate themselves. They crackle, they plunge, they examine—they move (in both senses of the word). The Dardennes won the Palme d’Or for Rosetta and would get another for L’enfant in 2005. Perhaps they’ll win another, because, since La promesse, theirs is also one of the most consistent bodies of work in cinema, and even if you were to peg them as having a formula, the work remains fresh because there is something in that formula that cannot help but come alive every time out: a pure, durable curiosity and belief in the power and the will of the underdog. 

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.