What is your favorite film? This is a question I have a hard time answering. I like so many. It's impossible to pick one. But if you really pressed me -- if you were to ask me what's the best film I've seen lately, I'd have to say Summer Hours.
Summer Hours is elegant and timely, quiet and charming, touching and wonderful to look at. It doesn't try harder than its narrative requires. And best of all, you might say it has a happy ending.
As I said, Summer Hours is beautiful to look at. The country estate is lush, verdant. The camera lingers on the treasures within the house, many of them authentic, having been borrowed from the Musée d'Orsay. It's a feeling of reverie. I felt pleasantly displaced, as if in a daydream.
I also like the film's approach to character. Helen, the matriarch, is clear-eyed about her health. She confronts her three adult children (on her birthday, no less) with the difficult question of how her estate will be handled. When she dies, her children are equally steely.
Because Frederic and Adrienne both live outside of France, it's Jeremy who must look after the estate, a task he's knows he's incapable of given the demands of his career and family. In the course of events, the characters deliberate rationally. They're not treacherous -- they don't scheme or deceive one another. It's an uncommon choice, given the stakes, for a dramatic story -- uncommon yet refreshing.
The characters suppress their emotions, which means the plot is relatively flat. No character is inspired to act in a dramatic fashion. There is no explosive confrontation. As the story approaches its end, we await big drama, the usual law being that the more feelings are pushed down the larger their re-emergence will be. So, it's an awfully tense final scene, then, when Jeremy allows his teenage daughter to have a party at the house.
In this beautiful house, with its antique effects we've learned will be donated to museums, teenagers are drinking, smoking, dancing -- all the things that fill adults with fear. Yet, in a stroke of genius, the camera lingers on these teenagers as lovingly as it did the house itself. It's an awfully uplifting -- yet extremely tense -- way to say good-bye.
One thought I have about failed happy endings, the bad kind, the kind that make us groan, is that they try to convince us that things will be happy forever after. The prince marries the princess. Paradise is restored. And so on. Summer Hours avoids this. We see the house being enjoyed as we know it once was but it's not happily ever after because we know the house will be sold.
A thought about good or successful happy endings, then, is that they won't try to convince us things will be happy forever after. That is, like in Summer Hours, they might be both happy and sad. We're happy to watch teenagers enjoy themselves, we're terrified something will happen to the house, and we're sad knowing the house will no longer remain in the family.
I was reading an essay by Tom Grimes in Tin House's The Writer's Notebook recently and he analyzes the ending of The Catcher in the Rye. Grimes writes: "Salinger's genius was to end his story and yet not end it, to give the reader a sense of closure while leaving the future mysterious and alive." I think that's close to how I see the ending of Summer Hours. We get a sense of closure from watching the teenagers enjoy the house and we aren't sure what the future will bring.
