Summer Hours

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Jeremie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling,

looking happier than they often feel in 'Summer Hours'

The premise that underlines Olivier Assayas’ film ‘Summer Hours’ couldn’t be more unfamiliar: elderly matriarch dies, her three adult children have to decide how to split up her estate, the Musee D’Orsay gets involved because said estate includes a lot of art and objets d’art, and some teenagers have a party in the rambling French country pile that has given the family shape for a generation. The end.

Given that I don’t have a) any objets d’art, b) a rambling French country pile, or c) contacts at the Musee D’Orsay, ‘Summer Hours’ nails what my old sociological colleagues would call ‘the condition of postmodernity’, and in that sense, ‘the condition of my life’ as if it were written about me. You might feel that way too, especially if you’re a middle class Westerner (in an ironic example of the limits of globalisation, that particular marker of non-diversity probably accounts for most of the readers of this blog, as well as the writer). ‘Summer Hours’ manages to make me think about be utterly compelling, to entertain and provoke, to suggest the contours of the world in which we currently live, and to suggest that its characters have existed before the film started, and will go on once it’s done.  A film of moments, because it knows life's biggest gravities often look tiny or even invisible when they're happening.  Trust me - as I look back over the past five years of my life, it seems to me entirely true that the most important thing I did was to spend fifteen minutes picking raspberries in New Zealand with my best friend.  All the external 'success', money, 'spectaculars' that may have happened are easily filed away into 'do not resuscitate' - they won't sustain me.  To sustain me in a sense of well-being, peace, and the possibility that I might do less harm to those around me?  Picking raspberries in a field in New Zealand.  That'll do.

(As for 'Summer Hours' moment of moments?: It's a close call between the protagonist (who dies in the first quarter of an hour - and that's not a spoiler) unpacking a new telephone, a 75th birthday gift that becomes something like the most heartbreaking metaphor you could imagine; or the way the camera lures itself up to Juliette Binoche’s face, and the sound rises as the camera closes in, and she weeps as her boyfriend leans toward her offering the relational closeness that the film is grieving.)

It’s a film about what drives the world, what family is, the role of art in living well, what the past means, the interconnection and fragmentation of the things; it creates a fully realised setting that I felt I could watch forever, partly because the way of life it is describing is itself becoming a museum piece.

Criterion releases ‘Summer Hours’ on DVD and Blu-Ray next week - gorgeous transfers as usual, and a pretty decent long interview with Assayas accompanies an essay by Kent Jones and making of documentary. It’s a magnificent film - one of the best of the past few years.

Spirituality and Activism Experience: Some Further Details

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Entering Belfast

I've mentioned before that Ian Morgan Cron (author of Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale) and I (both of us pictured below - exuding gravitas, don't you think?) plan to facilitate a Contemplative Spirituality and Social Action experience in my home of northern Ireland this August.  There are a few places left - so maybe this is an invitation for you.

Northern Ireland is a society birthed in deep spirituality and profound artistry; its stark and beautiful physical landscape parallels the ruggedness of the Celtic soul.  We have, of course, also experienced civil conflict in the recent past, as the struggle over our identity and questions of social justice found expression in sectarianism and violence. Religion has played a role in both the conflict and the process that has led to enormous change and political stability.

Dunluce Castle

You’re invited to see this amazing place for yourself as part of a unique communal gathering in Summer 2010.

We’ll lead a week of intensive experiences – we’ll deconstruct and reimagine questions of spirituality and activism, trying to find the fingerprints of radical spirituality and make connections between an ancient landscape, a modern conflict, and a better way of being in whatever world each us will be returning to.

Our programme will include excellent speakers and conversation and enjoying the land, visiting centres of reconciliation and meeting participants in the conflict and the negotiations for peace, and enjoying everything the northern Irish culture has to offer in the evenings (which will of course include live music).  We’ll use film and literature as lenses through which we explore the fusion of contemplation and action; there will be beer and whiskey for those who want it, fantastic Irish food, good craic and laughter, maybe even some surfing on the ridiculously entertaining waves of the North Coast.   Ultimately, we hope that everyone who joins us will have a life-changing encounter.

Saul Parish Church, near Downpatrick

We’ll stay in the beautiful character-filled setting of Rostrevor; there will be visits to the city of Belfast, the Giant’s Causeway, Dunluce Castle, the Silent Valley and other amazing places; there will also be ample free time to explore on your own.

The retreat is open only to 15-25 people; all (home-cooked) meals will be provided.  We'll be gathering from the evening of Tuesday 17th August, and working together until breakfast on Tuesday 24th.  We've scheduled the retreat to coincide with Greenbelt, which begins on Friday 27th August, so there's time to explore more of Ireland for a few days before taking a quick flight over to England for the festival if you're planning to be there.

For now, if you’d like to register your interest (with no obligation), or if you have any questions, please fill in the form here, and we'll get back to you soon.  We'll be asking for a deposit in the next month, but we're doing our best to keep costs lower than for other retreats of this nature.

'The End of the Line'

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'I think that man is not going to change, and the sea going to be dead, because man is crazy'. - 'The End of the Line' (That's not a photo of the 'end' - it's actually a picture of Ira Levin, but that'll make sense if you read on.)

(Re-posted from The Film Talk): The first time I had a tuna sandwich I was eleven years old. It was October 1986, and my mum had cast me in a staged reading of Ira Levin's play 'Critic's Choice', in which, if memory serves, I played the 12 year old son of an unpleasant theatre reviewer, who advises his dad on how to respond to a play written by his wife that he doesn't like. I was terrified, having neither developed a sense of being comfortable on stage, nor having had more than an hour or two to peruse Mr Levin's script. Well, he went on to write 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Stepford Wives', and I went on to eat more tuna. I never really thought about where my food came from until the fair trade movement of the late 1990s convinced me to change coffee brands in a neat inverse colonisation move; and since then it seems that every five minutes there's a new documentary about what's wrong with the world's supply-and-demand chains, and what to do about it. Thus far, Al Gore has made me switch off lights that I'm not using, Michael Moore has made me avoid certain banks, the Francis Brother's 'Black Gold' has reinforced what I'd already become convinced of where coffee's concerned. Now it's Nemo's turn.

What marks out 'The End of the Line' (just out on DVD and at I-Tunes) from other recent campaigning films is the fact that it has wedded astonishing visual imagery to an intelligent unfolding narrative.  Images that present the sheer enormity of some fish are married to a narration (by Ted Danson, serious, eminently listenable) that tells us, among other things, that some sea creatures are so over-fished it's the equivalent of ploughing a field seven times a year.  There's an overhead shot of a flotilla of boats that looks better than the CGI pre-battle sequence in 'Troy'; there are knowing jabs at the 'fashion-conscious diners' of Nobu, whose spokesperson helpfully acknowledges his apparent belief that telling people the fish they're eating is on the verge of extinction will preserve it, rather than simply not selling it; there are critical scientists who issue portents such as 'It's negotiating with biology; you can't do that an expect the biology to survive.'

So far, so educational.  And it's as education that 'The End of the Line' most succeeds; as a work of cinema its contribution may be limited to the extraordinary visual imagery (and the fact that it's only as long as it needs to be; there's no padding here).  The worry is that, after 'An Inconvenient Truth', people may either not be willing to sit through campaigning non-fiction films, or the climate crisis as presented in mainstream media - dominated, rightly, by Al Gore - has so overwhelmed the public consciousness that there is little room left to discuss or explore related issues such as the death of the sea.  Yet I learned in watching 'The End of the Line' that it takes 5kg of other sealife to produce 1kg of farmed fish.  The seafood industry as currently framed kills more fish than it produces for humans to eat.  The system of regulation, as someone in the film says, simply does not work.  But it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that, thus far, the delivery of educational/campaigning films has not been enough to address the concerns presented therein.  These films scratch the surface of what needs to change; but, to my mind, they avoid the issue at the heart of why our culture reverts to the mean, puts up with the postponement of living the way we know we should, if we are to maintain even the possibility of life: that is our fear, collective and individual, of death.  And in one of the almost too good to be true segues for which The Film Talk has more recently become unable to extricate ourselves from, that's exactly what Jett and I will be talking about in Episode 113, on its way to you soon.

'Shutter Island': Scorsese's Lament

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Joe Biden appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows last week to defend the Obama administration from Dick Cheney’s disgraceful attacks, which appear to suggest his earlier bloodlust has not yet been satisfied, despite everything his time in the White House accomplished. The current Vice-President had the opportunity to set out a genuine alternative to the war-first, don’t-even-ask-the-questions-later policies that Cheney had pursued; but regrettably did not. Instead, he actually seemed to play a game of ‘who has killed the most terrorists?’, citing the current ‘success rates’ against the Taliban. When Joe Biden is pressured to define success on the basis of how many human lives have been taken in a conflict in which open diplomacy has hardly been attempted, never mind exhausted, it’s time to lament.

Lamentation isn’t popular these days – we have large-scale memorials before the smoke from violent atrocities has blown away, funerals are called ‘celebrations’, and even the losers get a nice certificate when someone else wins an Oscar. We don’t do lament. So we have Martin Scorsese, former seminarian, cataloguer of the broken male psyche, and kinetic film-maker to thank for releasing his new film ‘Shutter Island’ at the beginning of the historic Christian season of Lent.

‘Shutter Island’, in which federal marshals investigate the disappearance of a patient from a secure institution on a windswept Massachusetts island in 1954, turns out to be a metaphor for what happens when an individual (or a country, or an era) becomes detached from the consequences of their actions; pretending to face trauma by burying it, and in that sense, it’s the ideal unofficial sequel to Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’, a film that suggested enjoying really violent entertainment the reason we are willing to entertain real violence. ‘Shutter Island’ risks telling an unpalatable truth: that war is not clean, that the line between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘enemy’ is ambiguous, that the post-Second World War era shattered community bonds, and allowed hidden personal brokenness to reach epidemic proportions. So far, so depressing, but theologically this feels like a Psalm lamenting human selfishness and misdirection; cinematically Scorsese has constructed a vastly compelling ‘B’ movie fan letter, filled with entertaining performances (Leonardo di Caprio as the marshal Ted, Ben Kingsley as the institution’s director, and especially Michelle Williams as a kind of ghostly voice of conscience), extraordinary use of music, beautifully framed images, and ultimately a serious commitment to telling a story that, while set in a specific, disturbing location, is so universal that it could have profound meaning for anyone who approaches.

Why make this film? The answer comes over the end credits, as Dinah Washington sings a song that could have been taken from the deleted scenes in an ancient Hebrew text:

‘This bitter earth Well, what fruit it bears. What good is love That no one shares.’

The song makes sense in the case of the main character in ‘Shutter Island’, but its use here is about more than Ted’s personal loss: it’s being played over the end credits to bring a lament about our culture to its minor-key crescendo. Who is responsible for our nation’s sins? You? Me? 'Them'? How can we live with ourselves when the inaction or action of those we have elected leads to the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands on another continent? ‘Shutter Island’ asks us to face ourselves, and not hide; and to recognize that accepting responsibility – that we are capable of being the ‘bad guys’ – we do not have to shred our own dignity. If the line between good and evil runs through each person, and not between groups of people, then even after we have faced our shared culpability in structural evil, we may see that there is good in us too. The film doesn’t present a solution, or at least not a palatable one; although it does suggest that merely making a decision to take one step out of the darkness is better than nothing. But the purpose of ‘Shutter Island’ is not to give us answers: it is to lament, which means that embedded within it is both a warning of what we can be when we lose sight of our interdependence as human beings, and, let us hope, a reminder that the purpose of lament is to prepare us for a new start.