"Summer Hours"

Summer Hours is a slow-moving, at times poignantly observant family tale that never quite comes together as a whole. From a relatively simple premise – a French upper-middle-class family’s dispersion of their mother’s inheritance after her death – Olivier Assayas examines modern French bourgeoisie’s complex negotiations with its own cultural heritage in a globalized era, yet too often loses sight of that subject in favour of narrative technicalities.

Hélène (Édith Scob) has lived a full life. When we are first introduced to her, she’s laughing at her eldest son Frédéric’s (Charles Berling) clumsily opened bottle of champagne in celebration of her 75^th birthday, basking in the presence of her children and grandchildren with the matter-of-fact serenity of someone who knows they have everything they could ever reasonably expect to need. Their big birthday gift to her, as one might expect from practical-minded 21^st century people, is a three-unit telephone set – “that way, you won’t have to run around.” explains her daughter Adrienne (Juliette Binoche, sporting a distractingly unconvincing blonde wig). The old woman reacts with befuddlement, then with annoyance, and finally with a resigned laugh. In 3 shots and 32 seconds, Assayas has subtly summarized his story’s primary theme and arc: the inescapable prevalence of time and the sacrifices we must concede to it.

As family-reunion drama customs would have it, Hélène bears a family secret the likes of which is generally kept as deeply entombed as possible for appearances’ sake. Yet one of the small beauties of Summer Hours is that hers is hidden in plain sight in the form of highly valuable paintings and drawings by her beloved uncle Paul Berthier, along with other sculptures and furniture that she intends to pass on to her children upon her death. Her children’s reluctant decision to sell these belongings to various buyers – including the house itself – is inextricably tied to their unwillingness to see and confront the part of their past that they all represent.

The decision to push Hélène’s incestuous affair with her uncle into the characters’ subconscious rather than explicitly make it the story’s driving force is a psychologically astute one, and the film’s best scenes are those in which Assayas lets his characters’ feelings timidly emerge from behind their banal words and half-concealed glances. Unfortunately, his film loses its emotional and political heart in long conversation scenes in which lawyers, civil servants and family members go over the details of the inheritance sharing process using plain-spoken dialogue that aims for naturalism but only achieves the kind of turgid triviality usually heard on French television.

The lifelessness of these scenes is all the more disappointing when you remember the sneakily incisive lines that peppered the first half of the film, such as Adrienne and her younger brother Jérémie’s wife Angela (Valérie Bonneton) citing their and their children’s lack of attachment to France as an additional point in favour of their decision to continue their lives and careers overseas. “French is the language we speak at home”, Angela casually tells us over a glass of wine, her inflection on the first word’s last syllable implying a “nothing more” that her next words all but confirm. These little moments expose a contentious point of fracture in modern France that Olivier Assayas himself, with his many multilingual films and American stars, embodies to a T: the globalization of its cultural elite and their perceived disconnection from the roots of the art, literature and cinema they create. Voluntarily or not, this underlying political theme informs the characters’ struggles, evasions and uncertainties, and remains mostly unaddressed in the film’s sluggish second act.

And then, miraculously, Frédéric’s woes as a parent smash it back into the picture like a wake-up call. His daughter’s arrest for trafficking stolen clothes and possession of marijuana reveals his own immaturity (“I don’t get caught!” he retorts to her remark on his own consumption of drugs) and potential legacy as a parent and cultural forebear. Think of the entire post-release scene as a quietly political riff on the infamous “I learned it by watching you!” PSA. This undercurrent reaches its final destination in an ending sequence that mirrors the opening images of Frédéric’s teens accompanying their younger cousins in their treasure hunt across the ancestral home grounds. The teens are still there, now accompanied by classmates and friends their own age as they prepare a wild party in a house that no longer belongs to them. The simple innocence of the earlier images may be gone but the lust for life animating them still remains, in the form of long tracking shots that capture young Sylvie (Alice De Lencquesaing) in suspended states of emotion and sensation, somewhere between busyness and fun, banality and joy, conflict and peace. It would be easy, especially given the underlying theme’s inherent appeal to reactionaries, to see this vision of teens installing speakers, smoking joints and occupying rooms for partying and presumed sex as a condemnation of ignorant, spoilt millennials trespassing on their ancestors’ lands with neither respect nor understanding for what they represent, but Assayas chooses instead to film it as a place fulfilling the purpose it always had: to welcome life and build memories. This final compromise may not provide all the answers to the complicated issues of transmission and inheritance in the context of France’s very particular model and history, but its hopeful eloquence speaks more convincingly than any polemical text ever could.

At its best, Summer Hours meditates on filial and cultural identity with intelligent empathy that Olivier Assayas’s camera expresses in dimmed colours and artful days-for-nights, evocatively completed by his familiar fade-to-black closings. Regrettably, his subsequent neglect of his characters’ interior journeys fails to deliver on these visual promises, suggesting an uneven grasp of the subject matter and resulting in a film that resembles its central character in all the wrong ways: confused, semi-oblivious and emotionally incomplete.

"mother!"

It is generally good policy to come into a film with as small an amount of prejudice as humanly possible, if only to let the mind experience it to the fullest extent of its faculties, without any pre-emptive formatting that the picture will more likely than not fail to conform to. Yet even with the best of intentions, it was impossible to ignore the warning signs surrounding Darren Aronofsky’s latest feature: Announced by its trailers as Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel as seen through a post-Kubrickian prism of immaculately-framed death glares, oppressive string music and explosions of sex and blood straight out of The Shining, mother! premiered at the Venice International Film Festival with a Rosemary’s Baby-inspired poster and a gob-smackingly self-important “director’s statement” tying the film’s genesis to its creator’s concerns over global warming, overpopulation and the ongoing European migrant crisis. Everything about the film’s conception and advertising, from its non-capitalized title right down to its highly polarized critical reception (usually an encouraging sign in these groupthink days), appeared to form a gigantic hand spelling out the words “DANGER: AUTEURIST CLICHÉS DEAD AHEAD” in the blood of its cinematic ancestors.

The warnings proved mostly correct. Much like its protagonists’ house, mother! is built on a foundation of recycled metaphors that crash, burn and rise up from their own ashes to repeat themselves in an Ouroborosian cycle of self-destructive violence that’s both too well-practiced and too crude to hit its audience any deeper than their skin. Using familiar art-horror stock characters, settings and storytelling tropes, Aronofsky puts a magnifying glass on his own ego but all that we end up seeing is how much our echo-laden film culture have artificially enlarged it.

The aforementioned director’s statement would have you believe the story being told touches upon all sorts of Big Issues™ of our times but it’s really about one simple thing: Male artists’ toxic need for power and validation, and the pain they inflict on the women in their lives in pursuit of these things – not a subject often dwelt upon in artists’ biopics but one that any romantic partner of Caravaggio, Picasso, Cassavetes, Dalí, Gauguin or Fitzgerald would confirm to be inescapably true. Thus standing in for Aronofsky do we have Javier Bardem as an unnamed poet suffering from writer’s block (of course) and struggling to write his next magnum opus while his much younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence) busies herself with repainting and rebuilding their secluded old Southern house, which was recently rebuilt following a devastating fire. By the time uninvited guests Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer come in to stroke the poet’s ego and undermine his wife’s self-esteem, the main points about psychological domestic abuse, emotional vampirism and patriarchal pressure have all been clearly established via typically Aronofskian tracking close-ups and displays of not-so-subtly domineering microaggressions on Bardem’s part. All that follows is just a matter of playing coy games of misdirection with the audience.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with manipulating viewers’ expectations and playing with their feelings before taking them to the emotional destination they didn’t know they needed to reach; Hitchcock pioneered it into an art, De Palma updated it and Lynch and Fincher are currently its most consistently skilful cinematic practitioners. But every red herring, dead end and manhole must bring its corresponding share of relevant information, insight and emotion, without which they are little more than distractions. Here, they’re mainly excuses for Aronofsky to digress on his pre-established themes all while teasing potentially more interesting threads that end up connecting to his primary idea in the most calamitously literal way imaginable.

With the exceptions of The Fountain and The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s plots are always energized by their protagonist’s declining mental health, usually in concordance with the single-minded pursuit of what they may or may not realize to be their own doom. In his best films – Pi, Black Swan and, by default, Noah – this is expressed by semi-subjective shots, narrative twists and editing tricks designed to make the audience question the character’s sanity and how much of what they are seeing and hearing is real or a product of their disturbed mind. mother! continues that trend by juxtaposing the family of fans’ gradual takeover of Lawrence’s property with disturbing sensory hallucinations hinting that the house may in fact be a living entity whose heart, diseased and blackened like Harris’s cancerous lungs, deteriorates in proportion to her mental state. In theory, it might make sense for Lawrence’s narrative reliability to be questioned, as much of the story’s emotional dynamics rely on a constant dissonance between her perception of other people’s behaviour and events and her husband’s, but that question is rendered moot by Aronofsky’s insistence on constructing his plot beats around self-evident symbols that scream out their meaning for all to hear. It’s a narrative language closer to that of fairy tales than psychological thrillers, and its resulting conflict with Aronofsky’s visual and kinetic languages cancels out any ambiguity over the veracity of Lawrence’s point of view.

Thus most of Lawrence and Bardem’s interactions with their Castevets-like visitors are tinged with psychological tension that never properly releases. They exist mainly to illustrate male artists’ dependency on people’s adoration and pain, as the poet welcomes their abrupt company against his wife’s protests and in spite – or perhaps because – of the many signs that their intents may not be as innocent as presented. The only guest to have any significant interaction with Lawrence is Michelle Pfeiffer’s snakelike upscale housewife, whose obsidian eyes are permanently drawn to our protagonist as if magnetically attracted to her slightest weakness. With sotto intonations, she pokes and prods at Lawrence’s archetypically female insecurities (fear of sexual inadequacy, fear of infertility, fear of unfulfilled social purpose) in the only scenes that successfully unify the story’s esoteric nature with its more human elements, briefly moving it in the realm of dark comedy.

Unfortunately, Aronofsky is too enamoured with his subject’s gravitas to consider moving there any further. When the intrusion of more external parties leads to lethal bloody violence, the scene’s intrinsically farcical nature practically begs for satirical expansion, but Aronofsky chooses instead to make it a narrative point from which to bring Lawrence closer to the climactic revelation and further toy with the audience’s collective mind. Even when the third act turns into a Pythonesque orgy of ripped-from-TV chaos, violence and gore, his need to make us gasp in shock and marvel at his own daring tears all the teeth out of his images.

From its horror-movie fake-out opening to its closed-loop ending, mother! plays like Aronofsky’s personal compilation of western auteur cinema’s worst tendencies. Using parts stripped from better, more original films as substitutes for meaning, it posits a false artistic self-critique that upholds rather than analyses his delusions of greatness. For all the horrific violence visited upon Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem’s wonderfully Cassavetes-like performance, with its dark mischief and the underlying danger buried beneath his squiggly face-consuming smile and devilish eyebrows (one of the more subtle Rosemary’s Baby references), the male artist’s God status is explicitly reaffirmed by the New Age symbols sledgehammered throughout the film: Man creates art, woman creates life, and God (re)creates woman.