I pay attention to reviewers and I look to the by-line on a write up before I get too far into the essay. It matters to me who wrote them, an old acquired habit that seems to be spreading across more and more media for me. In any case, I read a review by AO Scott on the new film Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas. The review is as important to understanding the film as seeing the film itself.

AO Scott’s review is, as usual, elegantly written and effective in using a minimum number of words to make his points. His comments in an 1100 word essay, touch on the camera work, the acting, the context of globalization, the history of civilizations, nations, and families, and the extraordinary nugget of universal reality created in this film. In wrapping up his comments, Scott writes:

Globalization is a phenomenon he has considered before, obliquely and overtly, in films like “Irma Vep,” “Demonlover” and “Boarding Gate,” but “Summer Hours,” as calm and quiet as its title, is in some ways his most coherent and complex exploration of the current shape of the world. Don’t be fooled by the apparent modesty of its ambitions. Sometimes a small, homely object — a teapot, a writing desk, a sketchbook, a movie about such things — turns out to be a masterpiece.

What’s interesting to me is that the audience for this film, at 3pm on Sunday afternoon, was practically elderly. If there was anyone in the 200 seat theater at the IFC center that showing who was under 35, I would be very surprised!

It seems to me that you have to have closed the house or apartment of a deceased parent to relate to this film. You have to have moved on in life and have had to leave behind objects you had treasured. You have to have said to your brother or sister, “I’ll see you soon” when you know they are living actually or metaphorically on the other side of the world and you may not see them very soon at all.

It took a certain life experience to relate to this film. The film respected the life experience of its audience, and it delivered an experience that the audience could understand and value. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon.

AO Scott acknowledges that, but he also points out that this film gives the audience a chance to see that process, to observe it, across life styles and generations, in ways that are hardly possible outside film. Scott writes:

This is true not only of families, which are always in flux even as they offer an image of stability and continuity to the world, but of societies and nations as well, and “Summer Hours” is, in its understated way, as much about France as it is about Hélène and her children.

Now here’s a sidebar. As much as nations and cultures and families ebb and flow and leave behind what they have built, so too will independent film mature and cross boundaries that it has not dared to cross before. Audiences will discard the accumulated detritus of past entertainments and seek — not new forms and new technologies — but new insights and new understandings.

Special Thanks to AO Scott for his review. IFC Films is releasing this title over the next 10 days in 26 theaters (9 of them Landmark Theaters), but they are holding it hostage to their VOD channel. I thank IFC Films and Landmark for making this film available, but I can’t help but wonder if these structures are also not going to be part of what crumbles as life experience triumphs in the current contest of form over substance.