Drucker wrote:There's a moment I believe towards the end where Frederic is crying? It really was a beautiful thing when both father and daughter, in nearly adjacent scenes, realize their past is really the past, and perhaps they've taken something in their lives for granted. That tradition which only existed for tradition's sake is kind of gone.
Frédéric cries just after picking out the cemetery plot for his mother - it's quite early in the film. However, I think you're right that there is an association being set up here between father and daughter. Frédéric is driving when he starts to cry, and has to pull over for a minute. The scene is filmed in a very striking way, with the trees and sky overhead reflected very clearly in the car's windscreen, all but obliterating our view of Frédéric himself. You can see this ethereal reflection of the leafy, skyey environment rushing by, and then achieving stasis for a moment when Frédéric stops the car to give full vent to his grief. The scene then cuts to a long shot which locates the car within this environment, among the vibrant green trees that have been associated with Hélène's house from the start. Perhaps the imagery here evokes precisely what you say in your post: the sense of a place and a time ('l'heure d'été' sums up quite well what the house represents) vanishing, and also of Frédéric's emotionally 'stalled' condition in the wake of his mother's death.
Similar imagery is used in the scene where Frédéric collects Sylvie from the police station. As they sit arguing in the car, green foliage is reflected in the windows on both sides. I think the subliminal effect of this parallel is to make the characters seem haunted by that house, that idyllic environment, by Hélène and/or by whatever these things mean to them, even when they're not explicitly talking about them. Immediately after this, on the drive home, Frédéric gets a call from the Musée d’Orsay, and Sylvie remarks that they can never have a proper conversation; just after this, for a split second, we see Paul Berthier's last sketch lovingly framed in Frédéric's apartment before he and his daughter arrive home; then the son remarks that he has no choice but to take an interest in the negotiations over Hélène's legacy, because it's all his father talks about.
The obvious point to take from all this is that Frédéric is allowing the house and all that comes with it to impinge upon his own family (note that his wife also gets sick of hearing about the Corots). This ties into the key point of contrast between him and his siblings, namely that he seems more heavily burdened by the family legacy. But it's also important to take the ending into account, and recognise that Sylvie has her own attachment to the house, to her grandmother, to the past - she also feels the loss of these things deeply.
I'll come back to this in a minute, but one point I wanted to make here was about the imagery in this film: we've mostly been speaking about it in terms of the characters, which seems appropriate. But no less crucial are the environments within which these characters operate, and the objects that populate those environments.
As I said before, the camera does a lot of (seemingly effortless) work keeping track of the characters and their subtle interactions, often in intense close-ups, but it works just as hard to draw our attention to places and objects. Quite often we linger on a shot of a setting even when the characters are absent. The opening shot (after the credits) establishes the verdant grounds of the family estate; when Frédéric visits the cemetery, the camera pauses after he walks off-screen, as though to take in the view from the gravestones (what Hélène will be looking out on from now on); at the post-funeral family meal, the camera goes out of its way several times to notice the table full of food, the quiches, the roast, etc; the Bracquemond vase is given a subtle emphasis every time it appears; and the dialogue cleverly helps to make all these places and objects conspicuous.
The sequence in the museum is a nice summation of this visual technique, because the camera prowls around like a visiting art-lover, lingering over beautiful objects - but notice that when we see the reconstructed Degas sculpture, we also see that plastic carrier bag in the background (the one Hélène kept the pieces in), an improbable detail in a practical sense (why would the museum staff keep the bag lying around after emptying it?) but crucial thematically because it shows how the film has established a kind of equivalence, or at least association, between these great artworks and the more mundane household objects that accompanied them (Éloïse made no distinction).
And of course that association bleeds into the characters as well, so that when I said in a previous post that the sight of the reconstructed Degas sculpture was kind of sad, I was unconsciously responding to the plastic bag in the background, and its associations with the brothers who destroyed that sculpture while playing together when they were children, but whose irreparable separation goes hand in hand with the putting-together of the sculpture (notice the rather forced bits of fraternal intimacy between them, like the fist-bump/handshake thing that seems like a half-remembered remnant of their childhood). The film is full of stuff like this.
The never-installed phone system is another obvious recurring object - still there when Éloïse visits the emptied-out house, still with the yellow post-it note Hélène wrote to remind herself to call Frédéric. As we watch Éloïse traipsing around outside the house, we too feel the tug of past connections when we remember the tenderness with which Frédéric ran his finger over that post-it note (at the moment when he came to terms with his mother's relationship with her uncle), and when we remember that the last time we saw Hélène she was unpacking that phone set, and when we remember the birthday party where she received this present - which was the moment when we first got to know her, endearingly unashamed, difficult, prickly, un-gracious, and proud as she was. A huge amount of thought has gone into figuring out the relations between all the 'stuff' and all the people in this film, and then into tracing those relations through the apparently artless but in fact very precise camerawork and compositions.
Drucker wrote:...but there's a lack of a back story to me. I would have loved an explanation of why the mother and daughter weren't close, and the brother in China too. Perhaps it's inferred that the distance from their mother at the party, and their having moved to the end of the world is all the detail I need to appreciate the distance in their relationship, but I could never get a real grip on these admittedly interesting characters, as I don't know what makes them tick.
This bothered me as well - after a first viewing, I felt that there wasn't enough sense that these characters were related, that they really knew each other well. They felt so alienated. But of course that's exactly the point. And it's something jindiana picks up on as well:
jindianajonz wrote:Its interesting that what you saw as central points (the family drama/relationship between characters, and the more internal and individual struggle in coping with the loss of a parent or child growing up) i saw as more tangential. For me, this film is primarily about how people relate to objects and give objects meaning. [...] It also makes me wonder what Helene's attachment to these things was- the fact that every prominant object came from Paul's artistic eye rather than her own implies that, like her children, she is valuing these objects for their associations than their beauty. Perhaps this is why she wanted her children to avoid becoming tomb keepers- She saw these things as more a part of Paul's life than her own, and may not have understood that for her own children these objects had such a strong connection to herself.
Great post, and you made sense of a number of things I hadn't quite made sense of in my own head (especially about Adrienne in the un-quoted part of your post). I was going to respond to Drucker's comment by saying that the film doesn't explicitly fill in too much of the backstory because it wants us to read and interpret the myriad details it serves up to us in the form of objects, glances, gestures, etc.
But your remark here prompts me to think that this film is centrally about a family bound together more by objects than by any feelings they might actually have about each other. This all goes back to Hélène, and the kind of mother she seems to have been to her three children. There are about a thousand clues, in that first half hour of the film, that tell us how hard she finds it to take any real interest in her children or their lives. She doesn't like the idea of getting older, or of celebrating the fact, which is natural enough; but in this case, it isn't old age as such she doesn't like, but simply the fact that her uncle is no longer around. It feels as though her whole life has stood still since the moment, thirty-five years earlier, when he died, and she hasn't really been concerned about keeping track of her children's progress since then. Her embarrassment when Adrienne and Jérémie argue over the virtues of cheaply manufactured trainers is, on closer inspection, not really embarrassment but boredom. What seems urgent and important to them seems distant and irrelevant to her.
Adrienne eagerly gives her mother the book ('not a real present', but then Hélène doesn't want presents - she wants this memorial to Paul Berthier), and when she later congratulates her mother on having done such a great job of preserving the great-uncle's work, the slightly grudging tone in her voice and expression tells us so much. Binoche plays this role to perfection: it's a beautifully observed study of the narcissistic mother's daughter, playing up to Hélène's obsession but hating herself and her mother, just a little, in the process. There is just the right mixture of cool disdain and resentful neediness in her interactions with her mother.
Sure enough, Hélène is quickly absorbed in the book, but when Adrienne starts talking about the lotus-leaf tray and the silver tea set, her mother looks up and seems to become interested again - but again, her expression when listening to her daughter's dream might just as easily convey boredom, and at the end of the scene she drifts into a memory of a trip with Paul in the early 60s, when he acquired the tea set. She remembers how badly the trip went for him, but smiles incongruously; a bad time for him, but that meant he needed her (her youth, beauty, unconditional adoration, etc.) and she could be close to him. Her smile here tells us so much about what kind of relationship she had with her uncle, and about her present detachment from the lives of her children.
And of course she can barely listen to Frédéric's career woes for more than thirty seconds without changing the subject to discuss the bloody Antonin Daum vases.
So alienation is the keynote of this family, and it seems to have trickled down from the mother. But while these characters may not seem to have particularly strong bonds with each other, they are not
simply alienated and isolated. Indeed, far from lamenting whatever is 'lost' here in terms of family relations, the film celebrates the articulation of individuality, and individual desires, and the development of new families in new environments.
Jérémie and Adrienne seem to be the most successful of the siblings in this regard, while Frédéric seems more burdened and even hobbled by the weight of family tradition. But we don't leave him on that sour note of slamming the door behind his daughter - instead, we last see him finally realising he needs to shut up about the Corots, and realising at the same time that his children don't need to behave themselves in their grandmother's house after all; that they can honour their grandmother's and great-great-uncle's memory best of all by just doing whatever the hell they want to. (It's not insignificant that Frédéric is eating a dessert in this scene.) And Sylvie clearly understands this, not just by smoking pot and playing loud music, but finally by abandoning her friends and running off with Richard, climbing over a wall in a climactic gesture of boundary-crossing individuality. I think Assayas said in an interview that he deliberately used a freer shooting style in this final sequence as well.
Just to mention 'Little Cloud' once more, its message - that happiness consists in naïve, childlike, non-conformist individualism - seems very much in tune with the real legacy Hélène has handed down to her family, simply by the example of her own life. So again there's this sense of balance: the painful consequences of Hélène's narcissistic parenting style are placed alongside the liberating effects of the self-expression she has implicitly fostered in her children.