Reverse Shot's best films of 2009

It’s been too long for this space to be called the “Daily” anything, at least with a straight face. Which explains why I might be smirking just a little.

The last post was a film-related link from Jeremy and so this one is, too. Like Mr. Bushnell, I had also only seen one of the films from the title-linked list (it was Inglorious Basterds, which I loved). After tonight, I’m up to two; I just finished watching Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (it’s available to watch instantly on Netflix). I haven’t read Reverse Shot’s discussion of the film since yesterday morning, so hopefully I’ll provide a fresh perspective on things (and without anything but the fuzziest of spoilers).

Stories involving the death of a matriarch or patriarch often center on the coming-together of the children, who then grapple with their relationship to one another in this strange world, freshly rid of a central figure in their lives. I immediately thought of Nate and David’s struggles from the first season of Six Feet Under, a series that spent a remarkable five years holding the profundity of grief and the mundanity of funeral arrangement in a fragile balance. But where Six Feet Under used funereal decision-making as a vehicle (a hearse, perhaps?) for its larger human dramas, Summer Hours opts to bring the decision-making to the fore.

Instead of giving us sibling rivalry, Assayas has turned in a tight little treatise on how objects and practices of our past relate to our present (and, in turn, how this relationship relates to that of the people we love). The last third of the film also offers a poignant study in how our relationships with objects—even those very familiar to us—are determined by the context in which we encounter them. This is Heideggerian in ways I’m only just beginning to uncover.