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.

Vivre le peau nouveau: Eyes Without a Face

Firstly, it’s a movie consumed with surfaces: a woman in a shiny black leather raincoat stalks Paris in an equally slick, black, beetle-like Citroën; black water at night swirling like an abyss; trees along a roadside at night awash in an x-ray glow of headlights; a carefully-placed pearl choker of milky white; stainless steel medical equipment that reflects hard light in its immaculate cleanliness; a satin gown that renders the wearer a perfect little doll, one whose face is encased in a smooth, immobile mask devoid of human flaw; and in that mask a sight so tragic and gruesome that the frozen camera can’t turn away, can only mercifully fade to black.

Originally released to much outrage and disgust in 1960, George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) was too well crafted to be dismissed as just another exploitation horror flick. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and so it was destined to achieve its classic status only gradually. It's still absolutely chilling and quite singular, a skin-crawling tale of obsession, arrogance and murder both lyrical and clinical. As Carlos Clarens wrote in his 1967 Illustrated History of the Horror Film, with only his second feature (after numerous shorts and documentaries), Franju had lit upon “the elusive alliance of poetry and terror.”

Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) works in a clinic near his sprawling estate outside Paris. Though highly regarded for his advances in plastic surgery, Génessier has withdrawn from social life following the disappearance of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who literally lost her face in an accident in which Génessier was the driver. Everyone, her fiancé included, assumes Christiane has suicided; she’s in fact secretly confined in her father’s mansion, awaiting the experimental surgery that her father has promised will give her back her face, surgery requiring the face of another, unwilling, donor.

Synopses don’t suit Eyes Without a Face. The story, simple as a fairy tale, builds at a deliberate pace, offering information in short doses and building suspense with little exposition. Early scenes in which Génessier’s devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man) prowls the Latin Quarter, smoking cigarettes and sizing up young women are presented ambiguously, and Franju gives an ominous degree of attention to simple movements through doors, down corridors, up stairs, as though our sense of architecture were essential to our understanding of the drama silently unfolding. It’s weird, and through its unsettling weirdness works very well.

I mentioned surfaces: the cold brilliance of this story, cleanly adapted by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Les Diaboliques, Vertigo) from Jean Redon’s novel, lies in our peculiar attachment to our faces, that body part most closely associated with our sense of identity, thus the surface reflects unseen depths. But ironically, though Franju lingers on many faces throughout, its probably Christiane’s mask that, while unspeakably creepy, is also the most affecting face in the movie. Animated only by voice and gestures made by her thin limbs, the mask becomes a haunted and haunting thing, with Scob constituting the movie’s closest thing to a truly sympathetic person.

Uncontrollable and uncooperative, flesh itself is an independent force in Eyes Without a Face, a sort of precedent for David Cronenberg’s flesh-driven films. But by the wondrous, beautiful final images, aflutter with newly released doves, dogs and leaves caressed by evening breeze, we see that Eyes Without a Face is also about the spirit, adrift in a world full only of imperfect houses in which in can dwell.