Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours is an intimate drama about the members of a family dealing with their mother’s death and the division of her belongings.

It’s a striking change of pace for the French writer/director, who’s perhaps best known to North American audiences for the playful Irma Vep and the brooding drama Clean – both of which starred his ex-wife, Maggie Cheung.

At the Toronto Film Festival, Assayas was so engaged in the political and social themes of his new film, we barely had time to discuss his older ones. 

Don’t take this the wrong way, but Summer Hours feels like a much more personal film than much of your recent work.

You know, at some point you need to deal with very universal issues. I suppose this film is a little bit like when I was making Late August, Early September, when all of a sudden you have to capture something of your own present and try to put it on screen as best you can. 

Amos Gitai’s Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras and Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale also revolve around adult children and aging parents. Why are all these stories being told at once?

I think we are a generation that has pushed those issues as far back as possible. Basically, we’re very comfortable with our parents dealing with it. They deal with the past, we deal with the present, we deal with the future and wherever our lives take us, wherever our art takes us.

But these issues can only be pushed back to a certain point. There’s a certain moment when all of a sudden your parents are not around any more and you need to have a clearer position – you basically need to define where you’re standing. What am I doing with all that stuff that’s not my culture, that comes from a completely different place and that has been important for the previous generation? How am I going to learn to understand it? I have to make an effort in that direction and try to do something with it.

The film sympathizes with Charles Berling’s character, Frédéric, who tries to preserve his mother’s estate – against her own instructions – rather than breaking it up for sale.

Frédéric is one of those characters who has very little relationship to art, and to the artworks; he doesn’t care about them. What he loves, what he cares for, is the role he has always envisioned for himself in the family. You know, when he shows the paintings to his children, he’s not explaining to them why Camille Corot is a great painter, he’s not showing them what’s going on within those paintings. And maybe he doesn’t even see it himself.

But ultimately, it’s his oldest memory of what constitutes his family. It’s a way of showing his children that their history goes back a long way. And he’s been those kids – his father has shown him the paintings the same way. He’s always had this notion that those things hardly belong to him. They have no value, in a sense; they are just part of the world of this specific group of people. And he will pass them to his children, and that’s it.

His siblings would rather sell everything and move on, but the film doesn’t judge them for it.

They have other priorities. Life has taken them in a different direction – their childhood is gone. And also, the thing is that what is driving them apart is not just their lives – it’s the logic of the modern world. It’s how the modern world functions that is creating individuals separated from their environment. We are very good at being ourselves; we are not that good at being together, including with our siblings or our children. And we are not that good at preserving those bonds. It’s the values of the society we live in that are gradually separating us, pushing people further and further away from each other.

That adds another level of sadness to the film, doesn’t it? The idea that families can’t even stay physically close any longer.

One generation ago, you had a corporate job and it was perfectly fine to have your whole career in Paris or whichever city you were living. Now the economy’s happening in China, in India, in the ex-Eastern bloc – those are the emerging societies that are basically driving the economy. So whatever job you have in the local European economy has a very solid chance of taking you elsewhere. And I think a lot of the values, the culture or the history of a specific country are now preserved within the family.

Summer Hours began as a commission from the Musée d’Orsay intended to trace the history of items on display there. How do you turn something like that into drama?

It always strikes me, at flea markets, the unbelievable amount of objects that you have no idea what their use is. You have no idea what people needed that thing for. But every single object ultimately belongs to something that has a long evolution; it’s been perfected through generations. And it had a use as part of the specificity of the lifestyle of whatever society you lived in.

But now, people tend to live very uniformized lives. A flat in Paris looks like a flat in Toronto looks like a flat in Hong Kong. And that’s completely overtaking the specificity of whatever makes us what we are, whatever creates our culture. Gradually, you end up having the sense that whatever has made you what you are is not relevant any more. It’s lost.

And now I see people – because they are completely losing their connection to their own culture – who have a much more superficial reading of modern society. People are naive and hardly understand modern politics. That’s why they vote so stupidly – they’re losing the traditions that allowed them to understand themselves and their world.

normw@nowtoronto.com