SUMMER HOURS

DIRECTED BY OLIVIER ASSAYAS

Bottom line: Brilliantly nuanced French drama about a family in transition

Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 9.5

“Of course YOU should see it,” said my friend Nicholas when I asked about the forthcoming French drama Summer Hours. Nicholas, an erstwhile Parisian cinephile of exacting tastes, and I had together seen one of Olivier Assayas’ previous films and been rather underwhelmed. When I asked him about this new one, which he’d caught in France, his response was tailored to his interlocutor: “YOU” meant “you, of all people.”

I soon learned why. Summer Hours concerns a storied old house and a family’s grown children trying to deal with their inheritance, which involves dilemmas that are at once emotional, cultural and financial. My documentary Moving Midway deals with the same subjects. Though one film is fiction and the other nonfiction, the parallels between them are so numerous that I could spend the rest of this review writing just about them.

But there are other reasons for my fascination with the film. Like me, Assayas was a film critic before turning to filmmaking. We share a longstanding interest in Taiwanese cinema and were both friends with the late director Edward Yang. Spending time with Assayas on a couple of occasions in the ‘90s, I found him smart and charming – he’s often compared to François Truffaut, another polemical Cahiers du Cinema editor turned celebrated auteur – yet Summer Hours is the first of his films that impresses me as much artistically as the man himself does personally and as a critic.

I’m tempted to say that, putting aside these various personal reasons for being attracted to Summer Hours, I find it the best foreign film released so far this year. But of course I can’t put aside those reasons or deny their influence, so I will offer that superlative with all subjective factors admitted, and give the film my highest possible recommendation.

The lovely house at the center of Summer Hours sits outside of Paris. It belongs to 75-year-old Hélène (Edith Scob), but it is more than just a family home; it is also something of a shrine to her uncle, Paul Berthier, a famous artist of the mid-20th century.

In the film’s first scene, a birthday gathering, we meet the whole family, including Hélène’s three children, all in their 40s. Frédéric (Charles Berling), the eldest, is an economist and teacher who lives in Paris; he’s married with two teenage kids. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), who is single, is a designer based in New York. Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), a businessman, works in China and has a wife and three young children.

As we get to know Hélène in that initial scene, she tries to discuss with Frédéric what will happen to the house and its artistic treasures once she’s gone. “Change the subject,” he says, uncomfortable at the intimation of mortality. But her foresight is well-placed. Within a few months, she dies suddenly and her children are left having to decide how to deal with their inheritance.

Believe it or not, this is a French movie dealing with highly charged family issues and yet no one at any time screams, loses their temper or throws a wine glass! (In this, Assayas commendably bests his countryman Arnaud Desplechin, whose ridiculously overrated A Christmas Tale was full of such overheated histrionics.) In fact, the film is a model of subtlety and understatement, which makes it all the more believable and emotionally compelling.

It turns out the three siblings have two views of what should be done with their mother’s bequest. Frédéric assumes that they all will want to keep the house, use it for family gatherings in summer, and pass it on to their children. But Adrienne and Jérémie have to break it to him that they see things differently. They live too far away to visit the house much, and both could use the money. They are for selling.

The crux here is not that one viewpoint is right and the other not, but that time inevitably brings the dissolution of family bonds and ties to tradition, no matter what is decided. Before she dies, Hélène remarks that when she passes, various things will be unavoidably be lost: memories, secrets and so forth. The film’s lyrical, gently elegiac yet ultimately clear-eyed approach perfectly captures the bittersweet truth of her comment.

Much of this story’s emotional content attaches to the house itself, and the film effectively gives us two “tours” in scenes which ingeniously and evocatively mirror each other. The first is the opening scene mentioned above. Brushing away Frédéric’s suggestion that she change the subject, his mother leads him through the house, commenting on its valuable furniture and artworks. Just as the light filtering in from outside has a summery glow, Hélène’s remarks about these object are full of the warmth of love and familiarity.

The second scene comes months later, when Frédéric and Adrienne are showing appraisers around the house. It is now winter, the light seems cold and stark, and there’s a similar coldness to the way the artworks and household objects are now scrutinized for their monetary value alone.

Besides their dramatic content, these scenes are notable for the expressive elegance of Assayas’ visual style. He has always been a devotee of camera movement, but nothing here is frenetic or showy. Rather, in ways that suggest a combination of Jean Renoir and Robert Altman, the camera elegantly surveys the house and its contents with constant, understated movements and re-framings that continually unfold new perspectives on the emotional dimensions of the home and its contents.

Assayas is similarly adept with his cast. Berling, Binoche and Renier are all terrific actors and their performances here are among the most finely shaded and engaging that I’ve seen in any recent movie.

Late in the film, Frédéric sees some of Hélène’s cherished artworks on display in a museum. He remarks that they now seem “disenchanted.” The whole movie is contained in that one word: This tale is about the disenchantment that time’s inexorable progress brings. Yet there is no anger or bitterness in the way Summer Hours evokes this process; the film is simply too wise for that.

Like Moving Midway, Summer Hours has evoked comparisons to The Cherry Orchard. Its themes and stylistic nuance also suggest the influence of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu and Assayas’ Taiwanese friend Hou Hsiao-hsien. Yet the film finally is a wonderful, hugely impressive original, proof of the confident mastery that Olivier Assayas has attained.

THE INTERNATIONAL

DIRECTED BY TOM TYKWER

Bottom line: A stylish, expertly made transnational thriller with a provocatively timely theme.

Grade (on a 1-10 scale: 7.5

In last Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Rich wrote of a tsunami of “populist rage” over the economy sweeping toward a seemingly under-prepared Pres. Obama. I found his argument simplistic and overstated. But that was five days ago.

In every news cycle since, the economic storm clouds have grown only darker. As the administration’s bail-out plan sent stocks into another swoon and eight leading bankers faced an angry Congressional interrogators, I saw a new thriller that left me sensing we’re on the edge of a new era of popular culture in which collective rage – as well as anxiety, paranoia, suspicion and the like – may well become prominent currents.

A movie like Tom Tykwer’s The International – a dark, propulsive drama in which the primary evildoers are international bankers – takes a couple of years to mount and a release that’s planned months in advance. So the fact that it seems so in sync with this week’s headlines is surely coincidental. Yet, that shouldn’t detract from its status as the first 2009 movie strongly resonating with our current difficulties, nor should it undercut our appreciation of how the zeitgeist super-charges the film’s meanings.

Tykwer’s film is one of those serious-minded suspensers that owes an obvious visual debt to Antonioni. The director’s unblinking camera-eye almost pays less attention to human figures than to the architectures that contain them, an endless succession of sleek modern edifices characterized by ingenious angles and pristine glassed-in spaces and cool silvery or silver-gray-blue colors. These places, the film whispers, are the chilly visual correlatives of a world dangerously abstracted from real values and human warmth.

Like capital in a globalized economy, the story jumps easily - and fitfully - from continent to continent. The protagonist, Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen), witnesses the mysterious death of a fellow agent in front of Berlin’s train station. He soon contacts Manhattan DA Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), who’s working on the same case. The trail they pursue eventually reaches from Germany to Milan to New York to Istanbul.

The investigation that sets the whole thing in motion targets a large European bank suspected of dealings in the international arms market. Why, Salinger wonders, would a bank take such risks, and even intervene in African civil wars, when the profit margins are so small? The answer: they’re not interested in profits. They’re out to gain control of the national debts of the countries involved. “The essence of the banking industry,” Salinger hears, is to make nations and people “slaves of debt.”

Though pungent and timely, that pithy description appears in a film that’s no angry tract but a well-tooled transnational thriller. Unlike Tony Gilroy’s similarly-themed Michael Clayton, in which the mayhem was restrained in order to emphasize character shadings, The International doesn’t stint on action. As the conspiracy widens, murders, shoot-outs, assassinations and breathless chases ensue.

The violence reaches a spectacular climax when a taut but subdued pursuit through New York streets leads inside the Guggenheim Museum where the prospect of a simple arrest sparks a gun battle that wouldn’t look out of place in a John Woo movie. With its sudden, unexpected ferocity, this eye-popping set-piece (shot on a sound stage in Germany) is one of the movie’s attributes that renders it at least a notch or two above many similar films.

It is a genre movie, finally, one that doesn’t color outside the lines, apart from hinting that its hero’s actions won’t be able set the world aright at the final fade. Yet Tykwer, who got his start with the witty, kinetically stylish Run Lola Run, handles his duties here with a cool, confident expertise, and he gets smart turns from Owen and Watts in roles that don’t attempt any real depth of characterization.

Simplistic by their nature, genre movies may not offer complex analysis, yet they can sum up the spirit of a moment. In its world of bankers run amok, with dreadful consequences that spill across the world, The International gives us a concise, potent symbol of an economically beleaguered planet and its mood of foreboding.

THE WRESTLER

DIRECTED BY DARREN ARONOFSKY

Bottom line: Mickey Rourke's spectacular comeback performance supercharges a conventional sports tale

Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 7.5

In most movies, even a superlative performance by an actor is secondary; it exists to support the greater whole. In a few movies, though, a brilliant performance is primary – the rest of the film depends on its catalytic revelations.

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler belongs to the latter group. In it, the incorrigible Mickey Rourke plays an over-the-hill professional wrestler with the kind of fierce, gutsy, mesmerizing incandescence that bears comparison to celebrated performances such as Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

The normally ridiculous Golden Globes charade redeemed itself momentarily this year in giving Rourke its Best Actor trophy. I’m rooting for him to cop the same prize at the upcoming Oscars, where his performance is easily the most stunning of the several excellent actors nominated.

The one downside in all of this is that Rourke’s work unquestionably outshines everything around it. Though directed with great fluency and texture by Aronofsky, The Wrestler is an earnest, unsurprising sports drama distinguished mainly by the fact that it depicts a “sport” that many people (like yours truly) would forever put in skeptical quotes, one that’s received precious little screen treatment previously.

Admittedly, I was not always skeptical about “Championship Wrestling” (as our local variety was called). At age 10 or 11, I was completely delighted and entranced by the antics of figures like Ric Flair and Haystack Calhoun, their straight-into-the-camera tirades and promises of mayhem, their almost supernatural leaps though the air and ability to withstand blows that seemingly could obliterate Samson himself.

“Professional” (or better: theatrical) wrestling seems to exist to animate the imaginations of 10-year-old boys everywhere with fantasies of heroic brawn and unshakable moral absolutes. That many adult fans apparently don’t question its ruses lends dismaying support to P.T. Barnum’s estimation of American credulousness. Even for those (including former fans) who do see through the travesty, wrestling exercises an inevitable fascination as the place where showbiz tawdriness conclusively trumps the ideals of athleticism - and where a subculture of simulation feeds off of our own childish dreams. Who hasn’t wondered about the off-camera lives of these snarling behemoths?

Randy “the Ram” Robinson (Rourke), the title character in Aronofsky’s film, is 20 years past his prime. You can tell he was once a star because he still carries himself like one, and when he runs across a fan who recalls his 80s glory, his face lights up with a champ’s indomitable grin. But Randy’s time in the ring is fast running out, and so are his options. He tries to keep up appearances, rocking out to speed metal in his van to get his spirits pumped. But when he gets home, his trailer is locked for non-payment of rent.

This is a great character for a movie, but what do you do with him? In the genre The Wrestler inhabits – the washed-up sports hero movie – there are precious few narrative paradigms, and Robert Siegel’s screenplay, though pleasingly idiomatic, isn’t up to reinventing the generic wheel. It offers a gritty, mutedly sentimental account of Randy’s hardships and relationships with two women, an aging stripper (Marisa Tomei) and his estranged daughter (Raleigh native Evan Rachel Wood), and naturally, it shows him trying to mount a comeback of sorts. You expected him to fight space aliens?

Still, in most movies about craftsmen, the most interesting thing is the guy practicing his craft, and so it is here. Considered as a pseudo-documentary that’s not trying to debunk, discredit or expose the wrestler’s craft - simply showing it as the difficult job it is - The Wrestler shines: Its best scenes are the ones in or near the ring. Trailed by a handheld camera, Randy joshes and calmly works out routines with his collegial colleagues, then plunges into the fray aiming to put on the most spectacular show he can.

The matches in The Wrestler are truly riveting, and in some cases astonishing. For anyone who thinks that boxing is a dangerous sport and “fake” wrestling essentially safe, here’s an instant corrective. The wrestlers go at it expecting, even courting and choreographing, bloody injury – using everything from hidden razor to staplers.

The reason all this remains dramatically compelling is, quite simply, Mickey Rourke. As if hungry to revive his own long-flagging career – the autobiographical subtext never disappears for long – the actor has transformed himself entirely, pumping his body up with steroids and weights - peroxiding his long, permed locks till he locks like a refugee from Spinal Tap. The fight scenes he enters are staged using long takes and, obviously, no doubles or stunt men. The punishment Randy takes is inflicted on a very real Mickey Rourke. It may be “fake,” but it plays like art.

And Randy finally is not simply a mass of muscle and stimulants. Although the script puts the character through fairly conventional paces, Rourke opens a window into his soul. You may not come away caring deeply about him, but you believe him through and through. It is a magnificent performance.