Form and Function: On the Object Lessons of Summer Hours

It is into the vacancy left by the group that Frédéric and his wife, Lisa (Dominque Reymond), enter to view the desk in its museum setting for the first time, initially passing in front of the camera so that we are only afforded a view of their backs. Then we turn to view them askance as Berling’s performance is marked by a great sigh. “Doesn’t it seem caged?” he says after some preliminary discussion. Frédéric’s discomfort with the museum is one of personal history in contrast to public good. He gestures to the vases in a nearby case, not yet understanding that the remaining Bracquemond is similarly displayed elsewhere in the same room: “They mean something with flowers,” he says to Lisa, “in a living room.” His argument is that utilitarian objects such as glassware derive their value from personal connections to them, as do representational artworks—he goes on to narrate a brief anecdote about a painting’s relation to its subject.

It is Lisa who first sees the Bracquemond in its new home. Here is the same vase that Éloise used to fill with flowers, now displayed in a glass case, sans flowers, sans natural light, tagged with a nameplate, all of which Assayas gives us via a slow downward pan through the case. “There’s another one,” Frédéric says. “I gave it to Éloise.”

They discuss, briefly, the old housekeeper’s Christmas card, and when Lisa asks her husband if he wrote her back, he can only shake his head. We see him through the rear of the case, through two panes of glass, his eyes focused just off camera on the objects held within, his wife’s eyes turning to focus on him. “I forgot,” he says. “You promised you would,” she answers. 

This is, I think, the most devastating moment in the entire film, the moment in which all of the themes of Summer Hours are brought together, wholly and completely, not only because Assayas gives us the recontextualized objects but because he shows the viewer that Frédéric, the character with the deepest emotional attachments to these very objects, has forgotten the much more real connection he shared with Éloise herself. This is Assayas’s objective correlative. The vase is in the case. We are afforded the reverse shot, Frédéric’s and Lisa’s backs mirroring how the couple first entered the scene. Cinematographer Eric Gautier keeps the vase in focus, so that Frédéric and Lisa blur. He leans his head against hers. The vase is in the case, and he has begun to forget Éloise. Already his ties to the past are slipping away or already gone. Time has moved on. 

“Come on . . . let’s go,” he says.

The palette of this film, its texture, includes Gautier’s careful use of reflection and light, most often utilized to obscure Frédéric, especially in moments when he is at his most emotionally vulnerable. It is as if Assayas wants to allow him his dignity, a decision that makes his pain—and Charles Berling’s performance—all the more intimate, since we must peer through the glass and the reflections to find this man and his wife, and even after that we are not permitted to follow them out of the museum, not immediately, but instead swerve back to the vase. Frédéric, now gone from the frame—and, we assume, the room—has commented that the desk looks “caged,” but it is the vase that is caged now, caged not only by the glass case that contains it but also by the architectural angles that form an interlocking grid in the background. We are reminded that only the second vase, the one in Éloise’s possession, remains alive, although this view is complicated by Frédéric’s own inability to remember to write her. That this image is of an empty glass vessel gathered together in a glass vessel with other empty glass vessels is yet another of Assayas’s symbolic systems that serves, as Eliot theorized, to drive the emotional moment home. These are objects of daily life given importance that returns them to their makers by removing them from their utilitarian history. It is the same desk, the same vase, but both have been, in a sense, remade as objects to view rather than to use, but in this remaking they are available to all comers, for everyone rather than for one family, or one person. In this way, then, film itself—an experience of looking rather than a physical object—is also a kind of glass vase, and this one is especially beautiful in its subtle movement.