I watched the film the other day. It seemed, at the time, to be a series of inconsequential and slightly oddly chosen episodes. But it lingered in my mind in a way that made me think it warranted a bit of thought. So I thought about it; and I now think it is quite a clever film about our relationships with objects, in particular valuable objects, and that there is good reason why the film shows us what it does.
When I last wrote about our relationships with inanimate objects, I specifically disclaimed writing about works of art. This is by way of being a companion piece to that piece, as Summer Hours is mostly about works of art.
Three warnings before I go further:
(1) It's fair to say that what follows is chock-full of spoilers about the film. But then I've already given you the main spoiler: nothing happens.
(2) The intended audience for this piece is pretty niche: it's people who watched Summer Hours and quite liked it but wondered whether it is really about anything. If that's not you then feel free to read no further (or go and watch the film first).
(3) Like the film, I will muse rather than come to any particular conclusions.
You have been warned!
The film starts as it means to go on. It opens by introducing us to an upper-middle class family and a lovely house full of valuable things, and the rest of film shows us the next stages in their various histories.
The family consists of an old lady, Hélène Berthier, her two sons and daughter, the wives of her sons and her grandchildren. The old lady's life's work has been safeguarding the legacy of her uncle, Paul Berthier, who was a prominent painter. I'll come back to her descendants in due course. There is also an old retainer called Eloise, busy with the housework.
The house is a charming, rambling old house in the country with extensive (but, in the French style, rather messy and over-grown) grounds. You mustn't think of a stately home: the English equivalent might be something like The Old Rectory at the edge of a scenic village in Suffolk or the Cotswolds. The family are not landed gentry but rather solidly successful sophisticated professionals. Haut bourgeois.
The house is far from being the only valuable object to consider, however: we see that there are a couple of Corots hanging on the walls, various important pieces of furniture, some splendid silverware and numerous other objets d'art whose appeal, I must confess, was lost on me. We also see Paul Berthier's sketchbooks.
All of this, I should explain, is shown to us naturally and as part of the story, and not at all in the programmatic way that I am explaining it. So, for example, at one point we see a glass-doored cabinet, one of a kind, in which the old lady keeps odds and ends, including the remains of a Degas plaster which her elder son broke when he was a child and which is now in pieces inside an E.Leclerc plastic bag. As I type that out it sounds heavily - perhaps plonkingly - meaningful, but in the film it is all done lightly and naturally, almost inconsequentially.
So, Hélène dies - as she intimated in the opening scenes - and the question arises of what is to be done with her things. My thesis is that the film explores various possible meanings or uses of those things. The film does not tell us that any of these uses or meanings are superior to any other, but it explores some of the pros and cons of each.
Let's start with the oldest child, Frédéric. At the beginning of the film, we saw him showing the Corots to his teenage children and saying, "one day, all this will be yours", to which they respond with shrugs, uninterested in boring old paintings. But this house - filled with its treasures - is meaningful to Frédéric. He wants to keep everything as it is, and he becomes quite upset when it becomes clear that that can't happen.
Frédéric's interest is in the house and its contents for what they represent in the life of his family. His relationship with his mother is not a meeting of minds (she has not read his books - he is an economist - and he does not expect her to understand them, and he in turn takes little interest in her work), and similarly his appreciation of the house and the objets does not seem to be one of comprehension: for example, he is unable to tell his children why they should value the Corots that look so boring to them. But there is love there, even without complete comprehension.
As I say, the film does not judge its characters' reactions to things. There is clearly nothing wrong with valuing things for their place in the life of one's family. But we are given a couple of indications that Frédéric's interest is perhaps overly sentimental.
- First, it is explained to us that the busy house, full of life, that we see at the beginning of the film, is only like twice a year: the rest of the year, even when his mother was alive, it was mostly shut up and quiet. There is a sadness there, and some element of waste - or perhaps of preserving in aspic what ought to live - in Frédéric's desire to keep that state of affairs going even when no one is living in the house. Is his aim to play-act at being a happy family twice a year? No, that's not it. Rather, no matter how much he wants to keep things the same, they have to change because his mother has died.
- Second, in an incident whose presence in the film is otherwise hard to explain, we see Frédéric's teenage daughter arrested for shoplifting and possession of drugs. (This being a French film, when she tells her father that he smokes weed too, he replies that of course he does, but he is not stupid enough to be caught.) This is a wake-up call to him that he does not fully know his own daughter: he doesn't know the bad lot of a boyfriend who has dragged her into this kind of behaviour. His interest in his family is real, but he must turn from valuing the idealised family of a family party in the ancestral home among the Corots and learn more about the day to day life of his teenage children in Paris.
The reason that the house cannot be kept and that Frédéric's dreams must be dashed is that Frédéric is the only one of the children left in France. So let's look at the others, starting with the daughter, Adrienne.
Adrienne is a cool designer who lives in New York, with an American boyfriend/fiancé, and even speaks English. (The film was released in 2008 and betrays that era's belief in inexorable globalisation: I don't think Adrienne's turning away from France is meant to reflect badly on her.) By contrast with Frédéric, she does share the interests of her mother: her birthday present was the latest edition (the English language one) of her mother's book on her uncle, the painter, and Adrienne accompanies her mother to an event in San Francisco about the painter. Adrienne's interest in the objets is far more discerning: she loves a small number of pieces of silverware, which she appreciates for their aesthetic value and because, as we pick up from her conversation with her mother, they have inspired her design work.
Again, we can see that this is good. But perhaps her aesthetic focus is too narrow just as Frédéric's was too broad? Adrienne is designing a crockery set that will be sold in Japan; she brings a sample to show to her siblings at the wake. But when her mother's house is being cleared out and the porcelain expert exclaims in pleasure at one of her mother's tea sets "is it complete?", she does not even turn around to answer: hugging her silverware, she brushes off the question with an "of course". Another example: she thinks that Paul Berthier's notebooks would get a better price if she took them to New York to auction there. But one of the few wishes Hélène had for her things was that the sketchbooks be kept together, and we later hear that in New York they would sell them page by page in order to obtain the best price. Indeed, we learn that the sketchbooks won't even be allowed to leave the country, which reminds us of another use or meaning for valuable artworks, namely as part of a nation's heritage and patrimony.
The younger brother, Jeremie, wants everything to be sold so he can have the money; he angers Frédéric by being too quick to instruct an estate agent for the house. But the film does not show this as mere greed. Jeremie lives in China with his family, where he runs a factory making trainers. His business means that he is not going to get the chance to come back to France for the next few years, and he has promised his children a holiday home in Bali. (I don't know whether 'Bali' is meant to stand for 'tacky' or 'glamorous and exotic', but given the generous nature of the film I would go for the latter.) He is making a new life for himself, and his family, in a more exciting way than Frédéric is (and his family seems less likely to do drugs than Frédéric's), and he is helping to create the future.
He is contrasted with his siblings. Adrienne does not have a family and her creations are small and in some ways 'artisan'. She is sceptical of Jeremie's factories and asks whether that is a good future, making trainers at the lowest cost. He explains that everyone benefits from this. Adrienne replies that she wears Converse, but he says, "it's the same thing". So I think the points on that one go to Jeremie: he is sensible and perhaps more productive, where she is sentimental. As for Frédéric, although he is an economist, Frédéric is sceptical of the whole notion of the economy, whereas Jeremie is out making things and building the new globalised world. (Remember: 2008.)
So we've met family sentiment, creative inspiration, heritage and ready money, what next? Quite a few things, as it happens.
Perhaps the next thing on the list is the burden of valuable assets. The children meet the lawyer dealing with their mother's estate and are told that her tax planning was not great, which means that the 'Fisc' will get its pound of flesh. (The lawyer, in a lovely French touch, opines on the "austere" subject matter of the Corots.) But the tax bill perhaps can be satisfied by making a donation to the Musée d'Orsay (were you waiting for it to appear?), which in fact Hélène has already had in hand by being in touch with a curator.
So that brings us to a consideration of the relationship between a museum and its possessions. Again, without being didactic or leaden, the film shows us a few things to think about. In no particular order:
- When discussing the accession of the Berthier Bequest, one man in the museum protests, explaining that it's "always the same with this Art Nouveau" (or whatever they are - I forget the details - some of it's Vienna Secession) "furniture. We're told they're one-offs but they just end up in storage." It's a good point. The Berthier furniture is in fact accepted, but we have at least been reminded of the vast amounts of stuff in museums' back rooms. Is a museum always a good place for something that is lovely to look at, if it never gets seen?
- We see someone being given a tour behind the scenes of the museum and we see that the Degas plaster that Frédéric broke all those years ago - the one that was stuffed in an hypermarché plastic bag and no-one really knew what to do with - is being carefully restored. That's good, surely?
- We see the wonderful furniture, now out on display, being ignored by a teenager who has been dragged round on a tour, now bored to tears in the furniture section, and is on the phone to his mate arranging a cinema date. Even the Musée d'Orsay knows that it is not inspiring or delighting everyone.
Concealing, revealing, restoring, ignoring ... and even that is not the end of it. At the Musée d'Orsay, Frédéric and his wife talk about a rich financier he visited once in Switzerland who kept valuable paintings properly secured with expensive locks and alarms and so on, and we see that that is problematic too. But that's not the only way to have nice things in your home.
One of the items on display in the museum towards the end of the film is a glass vase. Back at the beginning of the film, when Hélène is showing Frédéric her valuable possessions in readiness for her death, she points out a china vase and says that it was once one of a pair; then, lowering her voice, tells Frédéric that she thinks Eloise broke the other. A little later, as the museum experts are examining Hélène's effects, they spot two glass vases which are terribly valuable, although no-one in the family had ever paid them any attention. A little after that, we have a scene in which the house is being packed up, with items left in newspaper all over the place. Eloise comes to visit the house for one last time. She brings a bunch of flowers and picks up a vase to put them in. It is, of course, one of the precious glass vases, waiting to be wrapped up to be taken to the museum. She puts the flowers in the vase, and the vase on the desk, because Hélène always had flowers there. Then Frédéric tells her to take a memento for herself. Eloise chooses the vase, to remember her former employer. As she walks away we hear her telling her nephew that she was offered anything she wanted but she just chose this old vase, because "what would I do with something valuable?"
All of this is nicely done, with a much lighter touch than my exposition would suggest. We see a witty reprise of Eloise the destroyer of vase-pairs. We see Frédéric and Eloise sharing in an appreciation of items for their sentimental value. But we also see that Eloise is not just the only person who seems to be using these wonderful, museum-quality items as they were intended, but perhaps the only one of them who can. We later see her being dropped off at her banlieue-type flat by her salt-of-the-earth nephew, and we infer that the precious vase is likely to nestle in amongst cheap plastic ones or battered old worthless bits of china. But perhaps, the film suggests, ignorance of the value of an antique is necessary before it can be used. The vase in Eloise's flat, filled with flowers and prompting memories, certainly makes a contrast with its companion piece, sitting in a sterile glass display case with a sober information label, ignored by teenagers on school trips to the Musée d'Orsay.
Now, at last, we come to the end. The final scenes too echo earlier ones. We see the house, empty and about to be sold, being used by the family one last time. But instead of the multi-generational family party we saw at the beginning of the film, with small children busy on a treasure hunt while grown-ups sit and chat, it is a teenage party hosted by Frédéric's children for their friends. There is loud music and smoking, motorbikes being revved and balls being bounced, and dancing and youth and vitality everywhere. The camera again takes us on a bravura tour of the various groupings in the various rooms and across the unkempt garden, just as it did in the beginning of the film. The house is, again, alive - for one last time.
We then see Frédéric's daughter heading off with a young man, perhaps the unsuitable chap who got her into drugs and shoplifting (although he seems ok now), into the unkempt grounds, getting away from the party. She is emotional about leaving the house - she is her father's daughter. She stops to pick fruit and explains that Paul Bethier painted her grandmother picking fruit, right here, and she poses as her grandmother did in the painting, fruit in hand and the house in the background. That painting would have been a very special item to that family: a valuable item both in monetary terms but also as a reminder of the mother and grandmother they had lost and the house they have had to part with. "Where is that painting?" the boyfriend asks. "Some collector in Lyon has it," she shrugs, and they head off hand in hand. The camera then pans out to show us the whole domaine that the family is handing on.
The film has taken us on a meditative journey through the pains and pleasures, the burdens and bonuses, of owning valuable property, and it ends with everything put into the perspective of a wide-angle shot from an elevated camera, leaving us with the bittersweet thought that these lovely things, like the hour(s) of summer, must all pass away.
And perhaps that's a hint to me to bring things to a close. Inanimate objects: they are just things. But we find it very hard to think of them as just things.
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