Summer Hours
With the US elections coming up, I have absolutely no understanding for rich people problems. I’d even say that the worst thing about rich people is their problems, and it’s just like how a friend of mine said – fights about money are always about the money you have, not about the money you don’t have. Personally I am of the opinion that the lower middle class has enough money to live with some luxuries – I know that very well because it’s my own range of income.
I recently heard that Trader Joe’s only exists in places where within a certain radius there is a specific amount of people with a college degree and a yearly income of over 65,000 USD. I have a college degree, but I don’t even make half of that amount per year. But even I buy groceries at Trader Joe’s regularly. (Speaking of which, we are out of oatmeal and the ones at Trader Joe’s are my favorites.)
Anywhere above the poverty level, most of our problems dealing with money are unnecessary. In that sense it is indeed completely ridiculous when the Downton Abbey characters mourn about having to leave Downton for some smaller house but which is ten times as large as our own. It is also silly that “Summer Hours” is all about the melancholy of selling some house nobody is going to use anymore. Yet, luckily, “Summer Hours” is a little more than that. An art collection can be something very personal, and breaking it up is quite sad. It’s like finally forgetting about that person. I also have something which comes close to what art collections might be for other people – books. In the past, I have encountered several people with an extensive book collection, like our old neighbor, Loris’s parents, etc. etc. I envy them deeply. It’s unfortunate that my family, despite having been avid readers, have never owned many books thanks to the convenience of libraries, and the ones they had disappeared due to them moving around. Therefore I can understand some of the sadness in the film, where the stuff being sold represents some cultural heritage that even the children are sad to let go.
Nevertheless, it is without a doubt that the topic of the film is utterly boring. Like I said, rich people problems. It also doesn’t help that the film harks on this “things are so different today” especially with that dreadfully ugly garden party scene. Besides “La Haine”, modern France has absolutely nothing culturally worthwhile to show for itself. While the film sings its mantra that things must change, and everyone accepts it with heavy hearts, that scene makes the audience (or at least me) wish that it didn’t have to be like that.
Having complained about the underlying setting of the film so much, I have to say that “Summer Hours” is wonderfully written. I liked all the characters, even the annoying brother who considers running a sweatshop in China a bright future, and I thought their interactions were very unique. It is the dignity with which everyone discusses together calmly and gets over their shared grief, very much unlike in “Still Walking”, which make the film worth a look. Everybody is just so reasonable it’s almost utopic. But “Summer Hours” is a film more beautiful than it is realistic, and it treats its topic with a lot of finesse. Strangely enough, despite having claimed that I find the subject of the film rather boring and the fact that the film absolutely contains no drama at all, I was surprisingly never bored while watching the film. I just liked what I saw, I wanted to see what the characters would be doing next.
“Summer Hours” would have been a good PIFF movie, a strangely boring but good mood piece. I thought it was a very suitable film to wind down the day with, right before going to sleep.