The Last Movie I Saw

I came to Olivier Assayas' new film Summer Hours (l'Heure d'ete) expecting something of a thematic sequel to his earlier film Late August, Early September. The latter (which I loved, by the way) was a fascinating portrait of a group of friends approaching their middle years and coming to grips with the tensions of adulthood and mortality. The brief summary that I'd heard of Summer Hours, a family coming together to deal with the death of the matriarch, suggested a similar examination, but that proved to be a relatively minor theme in comparison to Assayas' inquiry into the nature of culture and generational legacies. The matriarch had lived the latter portion of her life as the caretaker of her beloved uncle's artistic works and reputation. Her home was practically a shrine to his career, filled not only with the uncle's pieces, but also the gifts of his colleagues and counterparts in the art world in the form of paintings and sculptures, but also desks, armoires, and (most touchingly, in the end) dinnerware and vases. The mother's death puts the fate of these objects-- and to a degree the "culture" that they represented both within the family and in the sacred (not in the religious sense) national heritage of France-- in question, and the story that unfolds in response is both fascinating and provocative.

I saw this movie at the same time that I was reading Roberto Bolano's novel By Night in Chile, which raises similar questions in relation to a dying priest recalling his career as a literary figure (poet and critic) during an age of political and social upheaval in his native country, leading to the era of Allende and Pinochet. His ruminations start with the a core belief in the power of literature to define something pure, noble, and lasting of his own country's best nature (not unlike the church to which he is also devoted). This is based in part on a certain ascetic devotion that pretends to catholicity (again, not in the religious sense, except metaphorically), but ultimately evolves into something like proprietary exclusivity that renders the works themselves inaccessible and ultimately forgotten. It certainly becomes evident that "real life" does not acknowledges such cultural capital as events outside the literary salons betray the common rejection of anything remotely pure or noble. The consequence for the priest is to be shaken on his deathbed with the realization that his longstanding anchors had failed, leaving him adrift in uncertainty and strangely un-articulate-able regret. Bolano's masterful narrative belies any notion that there is no value in art, but it cannot in the end entirely refute the priest's conclusion that its powers hardly extend beyond the merely aesthetic.

Assayas' film offers a different perspective, that offers more hope than Bolano's story implies. For Assayas, there is a generational imperative to constantly redefine culture-- not to become bogged down in preserving something whose value (aesthetic, political, utilitarian, or whatever) cannot be effectively translated from one time or place to another. He also seems to be arguing for a view of art that allows for individual need or sensibility to trump institutional interpretation in determining something's value. This kind of thoughtful, engagingly intellectual (but not snooty or overly intellectualized) treatment is in the end, much like Bolano's novel, proof that art (and culture, in the way that Matthew Arnold defined it) has a place, even as it perpetuates the questions about what that role might be.