Treeless Mountain

Little Blossoms Adrift

2008 // USA - Korea // So Yong Kim // June 17, 2009 // Theatrical Print

[Treeless Mountain was recently featured in a limited engagement on June 17-19, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

A- - Films about childhood abound, but So Yong Kim's delicate, affecting Treeless Mountain is a rarer thing: a film whose principal psychological attribute is its profound empathy for children, in a manner that never condescends or romanticizes. Painting in short strokes, Kim establishes an emotional wilderness of school-age loneliness, anxiety, and disillusionment. Seven-year-old protagonist Jin (Hee-yeon Kim) stands at the center of the film's story and visual language, but Kim, evincing a masterful talent for understated characterization and narrative, maintains a prudent and slightly saddened distance from her subject. She plumbs Jin's inner life by observing her face's restless contortions and her responses to the exasperating dilemmas that vex her and her little sister, Bin (Song-hee Kim). Kim's approach gently elevates the film from a poignantly observed tale of childhood, which would have been enough to satisfy, to an astonishingly mature examination of the ways in which naive expectations shape one's day-to-day habits, emotional topography, and interactions with others.

Treeless Mountain follows as responsibility for the care of Jin and Bin is passed along from their single mother to their father's sister, and then to their father's parents. From the adults' distracted perspective, this is essentially all that happens in the film. However, Kim examines these events from Jin's viewpoint, cultivating a secondary, more detailed plot about the effects that this sequence of uprootings has on the girls. While Kim provides just enough whispers and sharp words to suggest why Jin and Bin are shuffled from relative to relative, such matters are less salient to the film's thematic interests than the schemes and scrapes of the girls themselves. Thus, while there are vague asides about their absent, good-for-nothing father, much more attention is paid to the girls' cooking of crickets in a vacant lot, and their ad hoc play dates with a local boy with Down's Syndrome. Much of the "action"—if one can call it that—revolves around a particular totem: a cheap plastic piggy bank, which the girls believe will summon their mother if they fill it with coins accumulated via good behavior and guile.

The pacing of the film is both languid and fidgety, reflecting time's slow creep to a bored child and the anxiousness that an emotional upheaval so often engenders in kids. This unconventional cadence proceeds from Kim's distinctive style of film-making, if one allows that two features are sufficient to establish a "style" for a budding auteur. Her debut was the splendid In Between Days, a bitter fusion of an immigrant's tale and an adolescent romantic tragedy. There, as in her new film, her storytelling technique was marvelously lean, the narrative assembled from a succession of discomfiting, low-key confrontations, despairing interludes, and attentive observations. Despite this decidedly soft touch, at no time does Treeless Mountain suffer from narrative ambiguity. For a film with so little expository dialogue, it is remarkably precise, discovering through facial expressions, gestures, body language, and mumbled asides everything the viewer needs to know about Jin's predicament and her stance towards the world. Conspicuously, Kim brings her camera down roughly to the girl's eye level; low angles abound, and adults are often slightly out of frame or focus.

It would be excruciating to spend ninety minutes with the child characters from most films, but Jin possesses none of the forced charm or creepy adult mannerisms of such creatures. She is authentic and complex, alternately quiet, bold, manipulative, sulky, thoughtful, and quixotic. No mere cloying assemblage of adult neuroses, Jin behaves as a real child would in her circumstances. Several laudable films of recent vintage have used child actors to fine effect. Witness Simon Iteanu's luminous performance in Flight of the Red Balloon, or Catinca Untaru's scene-stealing in The Fall. With Hee-yeon Kim's Jin, Treeless Mountain achieves something equally fascinating: a seven-year-old heroine who engages not due to fantastic abilities, but due to her relatable qualities that transport us back to our own childhood aspirations, disappointments, and uncertainties.

Although Treeless Mountain is divisible into three narrative segments—mom, aunt, grandparents—these are not so much traditional dramatic acts as phases with distinct emotional and environmental qualities, each one containing abundant interactions and contrasts. Mom's urban apartment gives way to auntie's small-town cottage, and then to grandpa and grandma's farm. This outward migration is matched by Jin's meanderings through her own heart, as she attempts to deny and then reconcile her desires with the reality that the adults—those selfish, enigmatic beasts—have thrust upon her. Commerce is a central motif in Kim's story, exemplified by the girls' piggybank, but recurring in a variety of exchanges, rewards, gifts, and bribes, from auntie's attempt to extort money from the parent of a bully, to Jin's sly appearance at a cookie-dispensing household whenever she is hungry. Tellingly, the film lingers over little Bin's meticulous reconstruction of the piggybank's peeling eye with a magic marker. In this seemingly oblique scene, Kim foreshadows the moral thrust of her story. Jin must eventually abandon both the ruthless grasping of her lackluster adult role models and the magical thinking of her peers. With a little kindness and sensitivity, she may get halfway to the family she longs for.

Up

Oh, The Places You'll Go!​

2009 // USA // Pete Docter // June 18, 2009 // 3D Theatrical Print

A- -One of the most pleasurable aspects of Pixar's rise to the artistic apex of American commercial cinema has been the expanding sophistication of the themes that the studio is willing, even eager, to tackle. That sophistication reached its pinnacle to date in last year's WALL•E, an unexpectedly stirring film experience that addressed myriad science fiction concerns with a grace, liveliness, and humor unmatched by any genre offering in recent decades. This trend—the studio's determination to make the most challenging kid-friendly fare the public will accept—first emerged with Monsters, Inc., so it should come as little shock that that film's director, Pete Docter, has delivered yet another feature whose breathtaking surface conceals deep currents. If Up feels slightly less groundbreaking than Pixar's recent offerings in terms of sensory dazzle, perhaps that's because the comparison is so monstrously unfair. Standing alongside the virtuoso direction and cinematography of Ratatouille, or the futurist vistas and elegant storytelling of WALL•E, Up is merely marvelous, rather than devastatingly marvelous. However, Docter delivers what is the studio's most essentially human story since Monsters, and certainly its most mature in terms of its psychological resonance. Woven into a relatively straightforward tale of adventure, Up offers a poignant examination of how the reality of everyday life can gnaw at our dreams and seed cynicism in our hearts, tragically hardening us to the possibility of emotional connections with other people.

Up breaks from Pixar's previous features in that its high-concept enticements are not easily reducible to a one-word description (Toys! Bugs! Monsters! Fish! Superheroes! Cars! Rats! Robots!) Although strange creatures are central to the story, Up's hook is visual: the image of a tidy little house drifting through the wild blue yonder, suspended under a colossal cluster of rainbow-hued balloons. The owner of that airborne domicile is Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner), a dour septuagenarian with a mug like a squashed and swollen Easter Island statue. Explaining why a retired schlub like Carl would transform his house into an airship comprises only the first thirty minutes or so of Up, but it's a deeply affecting slice of cinema, not as crisp as WALL•E's perfect first act, but more narratively and emotionally propulsive.

We are introduced to Carl as a shy and bespectacled child of a pulp-tinged 1930s America. Capering about in flight helmet and aviator goggles, he dreams of grand adventures like those of his idol, Charles Muntz, a dashing explorer, inventor, and zeppelin pilot. Muntz has recently departed on his latest foray to Paradise Falls in South America, where he hopes to capture a rare, enormous bird with the aid of his loyal hounds. While playing around his neighborhood, Carl runs afoul of Ellie, a tomboy whose zeal for adventure is, if anything, even more fervent than his. Ellie confides her ambitions: to follow in Muntz's footsteps and one day live at the top of Paradise Falls (South America is "like America, but South," she intones seriously.) In a deft sequence of cinematic exposition, the film then fast-forwards through time, looking in on Carl and Ellie as they eventually fall in love, get married, and share decades of bliss and heartbreak, the latter embodied in the childlessness that biology foists upon them. The promise of Paradise Falls continues to beckon, but the inconveniences and setbacks that so often characterize life curtail their plans time and again over the decades. Eventually illness claims Ellie, and Carl is left widowed and ruing the adventures they never had together.

In the present day, Carl is embroiled in a battle with the stock cinematic menace of elderly homeowners everywhere: greedy developers. Also lurking on his doorstep is the ovoid Russell (Jordan Nagai), an enthusiastic tyke who needs a willing subject for his Elderly Assistance merit badge, the last notch on his path to Senior Wilderness Explorer. After things go from bad to worse with the developers, Carl hatches and implements his aeronautical scheme seemingly overnight, promising his departed wife that they will get to Paradise Falls yet. With a groan of heaving foundation and bursting pipes, Carl's house breaks free and he is South America-bound... with Russell inadvertently along for the ride. Where the pair go from there is best left for the viewer to experience, but I will say it involves Muntz's avian quarry and a pack of talking dogs. Yes, talking dogs, a trick accomplished through electronic collars that broadcast their every thought. (For a dimwitted mutt named Dug, this mainly consists of "I love you!" and "Squirrel!")

Once Carl and Russell are airborne, Up is dotted liberally with various chase sequences, smartly executed but not especially salient to the film's core emotional notes. (In this, the film mirror's WALL•E's breathless yet somewhat conventional sequence of escapes following the action's shift to the Axiom.) Up is most marvelous in its quietest moments, when it gently and persuasively permits Carl's grief and regret to bubble up to the surface, and Russell's own familial anxieties to be given voice. The film pointedly implicates Carl's lifetime accumulation of disappointments as a blinding phenomenon, one that prevents him from recognizing the everyday miracles of his life with Ellie, or seeing Russel's palpable craving for small, paternal intimacies. Recall that this is ostensibly a children's film, and it is all the more remarkable that Docter fixes his attention on the risks of emotional stagnation that can characterize old age. Like WALL•E, Up is thematically dense fare. The former expanded our sensitivity to a galaxy of ideas about humanity, technology, and the environment. In contrast, Docter's film turns its gaze inward to plum how our achievements and failures color our outlook, particularly our receptivity to the needs of others.

Perhaps Up's most unexpected and deliriously elemental accomplishment is its pinpoint evocation of a specific childhood urge to remake our surroundings according to whims that are fantastical, yet somehow reasonable. Many of Up's set pieces resonate with that youthful longing for secret hideouts, dream houses, custom rocketships, and other wonders constructed according to Crayola principles of engineering. While nothing within Up exactly embodies these imaginary havens—there's nothing close to the riot of plastic glee that was Pee-wee Herman's magnificent abode in his Big Adventure—the film echoes them just enough to prick the viewer's dormant longings for a special place crafted in tribute to shameless desires. It goes without saying that a house cannot fly under the power of helium balloons, but using balloons to fly off to a tropical Shangri-la is giddily reminiscent of the elaborate yet simple-minded schemes we all dreamed up at a certain age. (Carl and Ellie go so far as to place their own crayon drawing of the house at Paradise Falls on their mantle, enshrining their shared childhood dream as a sort of domestic snapshot not yet taken.) Who wouldn't want to camp in the rainforest with chocolate bars and animal pals? Or be waited on by talking canines that can serve dinner and fly airplanes? It's Docter's cunning decision to evoke this aura of splendid daydreams—the promise, if you will, of chewy, chewy cocoa-beans and monkey butlers—that makes Up so engaging. Moreover, this impulse acts as a potent counterpoint to the lines of sorrow and disillusionment that crease the film's heart. Up asserts that sharing the most innocent pleasures with kindred souls is a balm that, improbably, miraculously, cools the sting of loss.

Tyson

2008 // USA // James Toback // June 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - It's tempting to dismiss James Toback's absorbing documentary Tyson as an unapologetic hagiography of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson. The film is narrated and produced by the champ himself, and it doesn't merely gloss over Tyson's rape conviction, but permits him to hurl insults at his alleged victim. Yet Toback's canny approach does much more than solidify a sympathetic characterization of the man. The director interviews Tyson from an indulgent distance, using the footage as the key component of an ambitious and unexpectedly personalized tale. Tyson recounts his life and expounds on his views in sprawling monologues replete with malapropisms, upwellings of rage, and moments of poetic clarity. Toback's camera swallows Tyson's version of events whole, but also devours his eccentricities and slumbering-lion features with a blend of awe and puzzlement. Refreshingly, the director is less concerned with hewing to a Fallen Sports Hero narrative arc than capturing the specifics of his subject matter with passion. The film reinforces the enduring wonder of Tyson's athleticism with a triumphal style, but offers its revelations in a reserved manner, allowing the viewer the freedom to mull over, discount, or titter at them.

The Girlfriend Experience

That Certain Female

2009 // USA // Steven Soderbergh // June 9, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - Perhaps unexpectedly, Steven Soderbergh's lean, chilly The Girlfriend Experience shares two key elements with the director's previous film, the four-hour biopic Che: an admirable lack of artistic compromise and a thematic nucleus that is oddly straightforward given the elaborate character of the presentation. Once again stepping away from his brand of pleasurable, blissfully hip commercial fare to create a film wholly on his own terms, Soderbergh brings his talents to bear on a relatively simple story of entrepreneurial and sexual peril that plays out in the hotels, restaurants, and boutiques of Manhattan. Perhaps "story" is the wrong word. In contrast to Che's grand, exhaustive study of revolution as process, Girlfriend barely bothers with a plot. Or, more accurately, the plot is so thoroughly fragmented that the film's events and their relationship to one another are plainly not Girlfriend's focus. (This alone is a fascinating departure for the director of the Ocean's films, where the elaborate heists are the Whole Point.) Employing a structure that one could term "narrative cut-up," Soderbergh slices and dices the life of a New York call girl in October 2008 into a collage of cinematic musings on self-worth, loyalty, and autonomy.

The escort in question is Chelsea (Sasha Gray), a young twenty-something with a soft-spoken manner and a hidden competitive streak. The Girlfriend Experience revolves around Chelsea's interactions with her clients and her boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), as well as a few other personalities of benign and dubious intentions. Inasmuch as the film can be said to have a story, it is the tale of these encounters. However, Soderbergh presents them as a jumbled series of snippets, hopping around in time in a manner that is too disciplined to be called avant-garde, but friskier than if the aim were merely to construct a puzzlebox plot. Certainly, a disciplined viewer could decipher the clues—outfits, objects, demeanors—to assemble a "chronologically correct" edit of the film, but there would be little point. There are no mysteries left unresolved by the end of The Girlfriend Experience, but neither are the resolutions particularly striking. This reinforces that Soderbergh is much more fascinated with what the events unfolding on screen reveal about his thematic concerns than in the appeal of story for its own sake.

Much of Girlfriend is dedicated to Chelsea entertaining her clients, with sex being only one facet of the service she provides. Fundamentally, her clients want her to be available, on their terms and for their purposes. Depending on the man, she can be a companion for a night out, an accessory, a witty conversationalist, a shoulder to weep on, or a sexual object to delight or demean. In their presence, Chelsea is attentive and charming in a demure sort of way. Afterward, she is more relaxed, briskly tapping away at a laptop where she records every detail of the "client meeting": I wore these shoes, he ordered this entrée, we had sex that many times. She comes home to Chris, a personal trainer who is aware of her profession, and modestly supportive of her ambitions the way he imagines a good boyfriend should be. The film occasionally wanders away to follow Chris as he oversees his clients, contemplates a switch to a more upscale gym, and moonlights as an athletic wear vendor. When a customer generously offers to bring him along for a "guy's weekend" in Las Vegas, he makes a show of his reluctance for Chelsea, but we already know he's going.

The twinnings at work in Chelsea and Chris highlight the shared commodification of their bodies and the experiences those bodies promise. However, Soderbergh isn't aiming for anything as crude as an equivalency between the fitness industry and prostitution. Rather, what Girlfriend emphasizes is the extent to which Chelsea and Chris, both attractive people, have lashed their identities to their careers, with all the pitching and rolling that entails. Chelsea feels threatened by the emergence of new girls in the Manhattan escort scene, talks anxiously with a developer about upgrading her website, and is denigrated by a slovenly "escort reviewer" (played, incidentally, by estimable cinema blogger Glenn Kenny). Chris is turned away by sporting goods stores and dressed down by the manager at his gym. Everyone the pair talks to obsesses about the collapsing economy and the upcoming presidential election. Watching the self-worth of these two otherwise stunning people wilt in the face of criticism, competition, and financial uncertainty is the kind of humane observation that Soderbergh knows how to pull off without a trace of condescension or mean-spiritedness.

The film returns repeatedly to two conversations that provide commentary on the focal scenes. In the first, Chelsea commiserates with an older escort friend, wondering aloud how close she should get to a client with whom she feels an emotional connection. In the second, she meets a journalist for lunch, a man who smells a story in the life of an urbane call girl, but whose prodding questions put Chelsea on edge. These exchanges accent what is occurring elsewhere and elsewhen. The primary scenes of Girlfriend reveal a simple story of piss-poor judgment that grows, cancerously, from uncertainty about the future. Tough messaging in these glum economic times, perhaps, but Soderbergh tackles it soberly, the aloofness of his style providing the necessary distance. Girlfriend suggests that a stressful atmosphere amplifies natural human impulses towards hubris, cowardice, and defiance, and also exacerbates the consequences of those ugly urges.

Real-life pornstar Gray acquits herself well as Chelsea, a role far too complex for mere stunt casting. Gray's unexpected, low-key manner establishes Chelsea as a woman of prudence and discipline, rendering her eventual stumbles all the more tragic. Soderbergh evinces a barbed awareness of his actress' physical and sexual niche, for while Chelsea envisions herself as a sophisticate, Kenny's gleefully malicious windbag derides her as more suited to a "girl-next-door" role. The rest of the performances are satisfactory, with the exception of Kenny's distracting (if suitably discomfiting) turn. However, the acting in Girlfriend is secondary to the main attraction: the distinctive look and sound of a Soderbergh film, full of gorgeously lit locations that ooze contemporary style and a jazz soundtrack that jiggles with expectation. The allure of The Girlfriend Experience is that of a consummate stylist tackling fundamental aspects of human behavior, all while dismissing parochial storytelling with a wave of his hand.

Drag Me to Hell

It Burns, Burns, Burns

2009 // USA // Sam Raimi // June 7, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - Horror films with a camp sensibility are a dime a dozen, but outright giddy horror is a much more elusive creature. In his much-ballyhooed return to the form after a seventeen-year hiatus (if we disregard 2002's The Gift), director Sam Raimi delivers the latter species in Drag Me to Hell, a wicked delight so gratifyingly realized that calling it a "genre exercise" seems faint praise. While its title suggests exploitation schlock in the vein of Die Screaming, Marianne and I Spit on Your Grave, the trappings of Raimi's film are standard occult thriller fare. The tone, however, summons forth the nightmarish, absurdist character that was previously endemic to the Evil Dead films. Also evident is the bleak, even malevolent worldview that emerges from Raimi's smaller (read: non-Spider-man) films, from Darkman to A Simple Plan. Exhibiting both tremendous confidence and a ravenous appetite for unholy fun, Drag Me to Hell deserves better than a soft-mouthed label like "tribute" or "throwback." Let's be clear: It's a damn fine horror film in every way.

Raimi has always had affection for anonymous working schlubs, but Drag Me to Hell devotes significant attention to the personal details of its heroine, Christine Brown (Alison Rohmer), an eager-to-please loan officer living in Pasadena. In this, oddly enough, the film hews closely to Spider-Man, with its bittersweet tittering at the indignities heaped upon Peter Parker. Doe-eyed and perky as a daisy, Christine is not accustomed to antagonism or subterfuge. Her ambitions and doubts are as plain as the traces of babyfat on her face, which hint at the farmgirl life she is striving to leave behind. At first blush she seems an unlikely foil for Sylvia Ganush (Lorner Raver), the decrepit gypsy hag who comes to Christine seeking a third extension on her mortgage. Yet the dichotomies that emerge upon reflection are striking. Christine is achingly fresh-faced, quivering with aspirations, and struggling mightily to sever the ties to her old self. The haggard and ailing Sylvia desires nothing more than to stay put, evoking both a defiance in the face of death—the ultimate "eviction"—as well as the stateless existence of the Roma. (A strangely touching undertone given the film's distinctly Hammer-esque characterization of gypsy culture.)

Christine elects to turn Sylvia away in order to demonstrate her managerial ruthlessness to her boss. She is unfortunately oblivious regarding the consequences of scorning an old gypsy woman, especially one with a literal evil eye. Their confrontation eventually culminates in Sylvia's invocation of a foul gypsy curse. She summons a demonic spirit known as a lamia, which will torment Christine for three days before—you guessed it—dragging her down to Hell itself. This pretty much sets the story off and running, with the remainder of the film devoted to the escalating agonies that Christine suffers at the hands of the lamia, and to her attempts to avert her infernal fate. She turns to her professor boyfriend (Justin Long), a New Age guru (Dileep Rao), and a Mexican medium (Adrianna Barraza) for aid, but demons, as it turns out, are notoriously resistant to dissuasion.

Purely in terms of scare-the-bejeezus-out-of-you spectacle, Drag Me to Hell is pitch-perfect horror film-making. Raimi demonstrates that his skills as a horror director have sharpened considerably in the years since The Evil Dead's skuzzy shocks first made the midnight movie circuit snap to attention. Here the rhythms of the form—the frights, the lulls, the vise-like tension—are employed to masterful effect, all for the estimable goal of keeping the viewer giggling and shrieking with glee. As a rule, I consider myself a savvy and jaded horror filmgoer, and yet Raimi somehow had me begging for the scares. Moreover, there is cinematic cunning of a high order at play in Drag Me to Hell, albeit inconsistently, rivaling the most assured moments of Argento and Carpenter. The film boasts unexpectedly bravura compositions and camerawork that, while often outrageous, are never ostentatious. Space and motion are utilized to deliver terrifying gut-punches and establish a shifting tonal landscape of gross-out slapstick, harrowing violence, cartoonish absurdity, and tightening despair. (Watch for a slow pan early in the film that contains one of the best reveals I've ever seen.) The sound design is singularly terrifying, almost overwhelming, employing shrieks, roars, creaks, whines, and buzzing to convey the implacability of both the monster and Christine's destiny.

The moral universe of the Dead films has always been a troubling place, where supernatural evils seem to exist not within a traditional gothic framework, but as a kind of terrifying elemental force, albeit one with an unsettling sadistic streak. Drag Me to Hell follows this approach as well. Raimi's horrors don't belong within a theological hierarchy of good and evil. Rather, they lurk around the fringes of normal human experience, licking their fangs in anticipation, a sick, lethal joke courtesy of the Devil. Accordingly, both the Dead trilogy and Drag Me to Hell feature heinous and weirdly disproportionate punishments for actions that are only faintly callous, or even completely innocuous. It does raise the question: What are we to make of Raimi's apparent contention that one can blunder into damnation simply by doing one's job? (Admittedly, a loan officer burning in hell is really just the updated punch-line to a lawyer joke.) The sheer cruelty of a cosmos that would allow such a thing is unsettling, to say the least, but Raimi has always been less interested in establishing overarching mythologies than creating fantastical scenarios and permitting them to play out. Christine at different times is assailed by a malevolent shadow, an undead gypsy, a goat-horned devil, an invisible force, and a homicidal handkerchief. While Raimi establishes a foundational principle for his supernatural horrors—the three-day deadline—many of his set-pieces are just free-form riffing on a fundamental fear: the nightmare of being terrorized by unholy forces.

Christine is a particularly clever choice for a heroine, containing elements as she does of a slasher film's Final Girl, the menaced "normal" of countless occult thrillers, and even a bit of Bruce Campbell's signature resilience and cold-blooded exasperation. (Ash might have cut off his own hand, but he never had so much hair ripped out or so many revolting substances forced down his throat.) Rohmer bestows Christine with the requisite good-girl sweetness and—eventually—a blazing hatred for her tormentor. It's not a performance that leaves a deep impression, but it is exceptionally well-suited to the film that surrounds it. And Rohmer does get some great moments, particularly a few delicious deadpan lines and a fresh take on the expression, "Here Kitty, Kitty..."

Drag Me to Hell operates according to Raimi's particular blend of lucidity and unreality. By this I mean that his narrative is coherent, even elegant, as it ushers Christine from Points A to B to C. There is none of the aimlessness that often characterizes the genre, nor does his heroine ever do anything woefully stupid (although she makes a couple of understandable but tragic blunders). Still, an aura of the preposterous clings to the film, providing ample meat for nitpickers. Dozens of people behind a doorway can be dead silent one moment, then boisterously dancing and feasting the next. Los Angeles can boast a gothic graveyard with a violent thunderstorm as backdrop. When Christine's plight requires an anvil hanging from a pulley, one is provided, in Bugs Bunny fashion. Whether this sort of thing is troubling depends on whether the viewer is willing to accept Drag Me to Hell on its own succulent terms, as an exquisite device for extracting squeals of terror. The ending, a shocker to stand alongside Carrie and Friday the 13th, is just the ghastly cherry on top.

Summer Hours

The Spoils of Life

2008 // France // Olivier Assayas // June 2, 2009 // Theatrical Print

A- - The genre of family drama comes prepackaged with certain expectations regarding the rhythm and features of the narrative. The story will periodically spark and flare under the pressures of conflicting personalities, unresolved angst, and outright toxic behavior. There will be tragedies, often several of them, and secrets will emerge from musty closets. Invigorating cinema can be made from such dross—witness Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married from just last year, which did Deliciously Ugly quite well. Rare, however, is the film that discovers drama within a family experience without reference to the genre's usual, ruthless patterns. Here is such a work: Olivier Assayas' delicate, dauntless Summer Hours, a marvelous film that will upend the viewer's expectations time and again. It is not the sort of cinema that offers smug familial warmth, or a free-fall of despair, or awe at the "boldness" of its directorial vision. It is, however, a work of profound beauty, with a meticulous awareness for time, spaces, objects, and emotions. It invites us to spend a year or so with an extended clan of educated, cultured people and witness their wary navigation of life, especially the parts that make the heart ache. Sound dull? Perish the thought.

The film opens on an annual summer birthday visit to the country house of Hélène (Edith Scob), a stately matriarch in a clan comprising her three adult children, their spouses, and a gaggle of grandchildren. A widow, Hélène has devoted her life to the legacy of her uncle, a modestly celebrated painter for whom she had deep affection. The house and all its furnishings are his, and since his death over three decades ago, Hélène has tended to the estate as though it were a museum. Her children, too young to cherish any memories of their great-uncle, have other concerns. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is an economist in Paris, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) a designer in New York, and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) an industrial manager in China. When brought together under Hélène's roof, the lines of division in their concerns and politics emerge, albeit gently. Everyone is a little self-absorbed, but no one is insufferable. They discuss their jobs, their families, their travel arrangements. They don't talk about Hélène's long months in the house with only the housekeeper, Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan), for company, or about how little time their mother has left.

However, Hélène wants to talk. She pulls Frédéric aside and takes him on a morbid tour of the house, cataloging the future fates of the artifacts: this desk should be donated to the museum, these sketchbooks should be sold. Frédéric doesn't want to hear it. He is put-upon and anxious about the responsibility of the estate, and uncomfortable even talking about his mother's passing. After the celebrations are over and the families hustle off, Éloïse finds Hélène sitting silently in the darkening parlor, steeping in her melancholy. Assayas then leaps forward by several months and reveals that Hélène has died. There is no trace of a shock. Death, after all, is the most expected thing in the world.

Much of Summer Hours concerns itself with the after-effects of Hélène's death, particularly the intimidating task of dealing with her uncle's furnishings, artwork, and personal effects, not to mention the country house itself. Assayas is charmingly absorbed with this process as a primary subject. Nimble as a storyteller, he leaps gracefully from scene to scene, lingering on details as necessary to evoke the simultaneously reverential and ghoulish character of the enterprise. Proximally, then, the film is a gently observed drama about how a large and valuable estate can be a stressor for the survivors. Appropriately for this purpose, there are morsels of melodrama sprinkled throughout the story, often resting wherever the differing priorities of the children intersect. Frédéric assumes that they will keep the house for communal use in the summertime, but Adrienne and Jérémie protest that this doesn't fit in with their needs or future plans. There are tensions and some harsh words, but no screaming or backstabbing. Conflicts are resolved and new hindrances crop up. The traces of Hélène are crated, rolled up, wrapped in paper, and carted away. Personal treasures are discovered and reclaimed. A discomfiting family secret emerges, but without the accompanying hideous spectacle we might expect.

If Summer Hours were solely about the tribulations of dealing with Hélène's estate, it would be a satisfying and exceptionally crafted film, albeit one that would be grasping for relevance. (Audience ambivalence is a particular hobgoblin in any film predicated on "Pretty People with Problems," as my wife would say.) As it is, Assayas uses Hélène's death as a entry point for a examination of the value of objects and places, and in particular how those values are inherently subjective, transitory, and even unstable. It's this secondary dimension of Summer Hours--emergent and yet somewhat separate from the particulars of selling artwork and dealing with attorneys--that is so captivating and stirringly conveyed. Much of the film's emotional potency derives from the talents of cinematographer Eric Gautier. Motion and framing accentuate the tone of the various spaces--a Parisian apartment, a clerk's office, a chilly museum, a cafe--without showiness, all while giving the lie to the myth of locational neutrality. (Every place has a bias and a mood, if only for a moment.) When the camera roams through Hélène's house or soars above the woodlands of the surrounding countryside, the film reaffirms with startling authority the wistfulness that undergirds the characters' nostalgia. On four occasions Assayas inventories the country house with long, wandering sequences, noting its transformation from shrine to shop to shell to--wittily, unexpectedly--a liberated space for boisterous adolescents. In recent years Gautier brought sensory sizzle to Into the Wild and Private Fears in Public Places, two films that fall firmly under the umbrella of Ambitious, Annoying, and Beautiful to Look At. This film represents a far greater achievement, as Assayas utilizes Gautier's camera to decisively and poignantly convey theme.

Summer Hours is a film highly attuned to the subtle, often contradictory currents tugging at the characters. Rather than spurring them into a collision just to see the catastrophic consequences, Assayas permits the family members to wrestle with challenges as humans would in real life, their agony evolving and their frustration palpable. Sometimes the characters convert others to their way of thinking, sometimes they suffer in silence, and sometimes they are diverted by other tasks. Another film, a less innovative and touching film, would find ample opportunities for shrill and distracting melodrama: Frédéric's daughter's arrest for shoplifting, Éloïse's unfortunate preference for a particular vase, Adrienne's sudden confession of her engagement. Any one of these plot threads might have led to a narrative explosion with consequences rippling far and wide. Assayas offers something far more sophisticated. His explosion is a whimper, a death that is neither exceptional nor unexpected, but he traces its ripples with impressive sensitivity for sorrow's mutability, as well as respect for the highly personalized way that people view objects and places.