Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)

Jérémie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling in Summer Hours

Cast: Charles Berling, Juliette Bioche, Jérémie Renier, Edith Scob, Dominique Reymond, Valérie Bonneton, Isabelle Sadoyan, Kyle Eastwood, Alice de Lencquesaing, Emile Berling, Jean-Baptiste Malartre. Screenplay: Olivier Assayas. Cinematography: Eric Gautier. Art direction: Fanny Stauff.  Film editing: Luc Barnier.

Summer Hours sounds like the title of a film by Yasujiro Ozu, but the resemblance doesn't stop there. It has the melancholy tinged with humor of that master's films, and like his Tokyo Story (1953), it begins with a family gathering and the subsequent death of the matriarch. But it takes place in another country half a century later, and milieu is almost everything. Now we are in France, and the characters it centers on, the siblings Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), are caught up in the global economy, with all that implies about letting go of the past, of pulling up roots. The Marly siblings, their spouses and children, and their mother, Hélène Berthier (who took her maiden name back after the death of her husband), are apparently content with their lives, but happy families are really not all alike. Olivier Assayas's story centers on a legacy, the stuff of 19th-century novels and murder mysteries as recent as Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019). But Assayas never lets his film sink into melodrama or the flamboyant acting out of squabbling heirs. It's about mature people facing the inevitable. Hélène (Edith Scob) has inherited the house owned by her uncle, a famous artist, which is filled with valuable works of art, though it is rather run down and very much lived in. The decorative panels by Redon are marred by damp, a broken plaster statuette by Degas is shoved into a cabinet -- itself a work of art -- in a plastic shopping bag, the art nouveau desk is cluttered with papers, and a couple of Corots hang casually in a hallway. When the family gathers there to celebrate Hélène's 75th birthday, she pulls the oldest, Frédéric, aside to give him some instructions about what to do with things when she's gone. This invariably awkward discussion is handled by Assayas and the actors with truth and finesse. Soon, sure enough, Hélène is dead, and the rest of the film is about the family coming to terms with the consequences of a legacy all of them treasure but none of them really has room for in their lives. It might be classified as a character study rather than a drama, but Assayas and company build such intimacy with the characters that we can feel the drama as intensely as if it dealt with matters of great moment and urgency.

La Promesse (Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 1996)

Jérémie Renier in La Promesse

Igor: Jérémie Renier
Roger: Olivier Gourmet
Assita: Assita Ouedraogo
Hamidu: Rasmane Ouedraogo
The Garage Boss: Frédéric Bodson

Director: Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Screenplay: Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Cinematography: Alain Marcoen

La Promesse is one of those films in which you can see from the very beginning that things are not going to turn out well for any of its characters. But what keeps you going is the complete commitment and skill of its performers, especially 15-year-old Jérémie Renier, and the careful articulation of its moral conundrums by the Dardenne brothers. Renier plays Igor, who has left school to work as an apprentice garage mechanic, but is often in conflict with his boss because he keeps getting called away to assist his father, Roger, who is involved in the underground traffic in undocumented immigrants. Roger exploits the immigrants, many of whom come from Eastern Europe or from Africa, seeking work in the industrial towns of Belgium like Seraing, the Dardennes' home town. Roger provides slum housing and forged documents for the immigrants, and employs them illegally as construction workers on a house he's renovating. In addition to charging them exorbitantly for substandard lodging, he sometimes makes a little money by turning them in to corrupt immigration officials out to fill their quota. Igor doesn't have second thoughts about what his father does, and even seems to be something of a chip off the old block: He filches a wallet off the seat of a car he has just serviced and assures its owner that she must have lost it somewhere, then buries it in a vacant lot after cleaning out the cash. But one day he is called away from the garage -- the boss tells him not to come back after so many absences -- because Roger has just been warned that inspectors are coming to his illegal construction site. He speeds there on his motorbike to warn the workers, who include Hamidu, a man from Burkina Faso who has just been joined in Seraing by his wife and infant son. During the attempt to flee the site, Hamidu falls from the scaffold on which he has been working -- we don't see the fall but instead we see Igor discover the unconscious Hamidu lying beneath the scaffolding. When he sees that Hamidu is bleeding from his leg, Igor tries to make a tourniquet from his belt, but Roger arrives on the scene and snatches the belt away: Hamidu is too far gone, and taking him to the hospital would only expose Roger's illegal practices to the authorities. When Roger goes to find a place to hide the dying man, Hamidu wakes long enough to elicit from Igor a promise to look after his wife, Assita, and their child. With Igor's reluctant help, Roger buries Hamidu in cement on the construction site. But the promise he has made awakens Igor's conscience, and the film takes its course from there, as Igor tries to help Assita escape from the situation into which Hamidu's death, and Roger's attempts to cover it up, place her. The Dardennes build real suspense as the story progresses, but there is no deus ex machina to provide an unlikely happy ending. Only a kind of moment of clarity for Igor gives his and Assita's dilemma, with its disturbingly contemporary resonances, a faint glimmer of hope.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in In Bruges

Ray: Colin Farrell
Ken: Brendan Gleeson
Harry: Ralph Fiennes
Chloe: Clémence Poésy
Jimmy: Jordan Prentice
Yuri: Eric Godon
Canadian Man: Zeljko Ivanek
Eirik: Jérémie Renier
Marie: Thekla Reuten

Director: Martin McDonagh
Screenplay: Martin McDonagh
Cinematography: Eigil Bryld
Music: Carter Burwell

Martin McDonagh's In Bruges is a bloody little gem about two hitmen, Ray and Ken, who have been sent by their boss, Harry, to the picturesque Belgian city of Bruges to await further instructions. Brooding, depressed Ray thinks Bruges is a "shithole," whereas Ken is rather taken with the medieval architecture, the cobblestone streets, and the canals. Ray's deep funk stems from guilt: While carrying out a hit Harry ordered -- we never find out why -- on a priest (Ciarán Hinds in an unbilled cameo), Ray accidentally killed a small boy who was standing behind the priest, waiting his turn in the confessional. Ken drags Ray around the city, trying to raise his spirits with sightseeing, but the only thing that works is Ray's discovery of a crew making a film on location and particularly of the pretty Chloe, a production assistant who is actually a drug dealer. Ray is also enchanted that one of the actors is what he calls "a midget" named Jimmy, which allows him to investigate his theory that little people are particularly inclined to be suicidal. Wait, I'm getting lost in the filigree that In Bruges is full of. To return to the main plot, it turns out that the real reason Harry has sent Ray and Ken to Bruges is so Ray can have a good time before Ken kills him. But to understand that, you have to go back into the filigree again: Harry has his own personal gangster code, one article of which is that you must never kill a child, so Ray has to pay the price, but since one of Harry's few happy memories is of the time he spent at the age of 7 in Bruges, he naturally assumes that the trip will be so delightful for Ray that he can die happy. Writer-director McDonagh's imaginative intricacies of characterization and motive might have resulted in only a somewhat twee black comedy if it weren't for the brilliance of his performers, especially Farrell in a part that turned him from a second-string leading man to a specialist in eccentric characters in oddball independent films like Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015). In Bruges is crowded with unexpectedly colorful secondary characters, including Zeljko Ivanek as a Canadian whom Ray insults in a restaurant by mistaking him for an American; Jérémie Renier as Chloe's former boyfriend, who attacks Ray but winds up getting shot in the face with his own gun, loaded with blanks; and Thekla Reuten as Marie, the proprietor of the boutique hotel where Ray and Ken are staying, who meticulously takes down a message to them from Harry, who emphasizes every word in the message by modifying it with "fucking." It's true that the film ends in a bloodbath, but somehow the tone McDonagh has established, with the help of a fine score by Carter Burwell, allows it to transcend its violent excesses.

The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2011)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have said that they were influenced by fairytales when they wrote and directed The Kid With a Bike. Like the Grimm brothers, the Dardenne brothers don't bother giving the backstories of the "good" and "bad" characters in the film. We don't ask how the wicked stepmothers in fairytales got to be so wicked or why the fairy godmothers are so good. In a similar fashion, we are never told what causes Guy Catoul (Jérémie Renier) to be so coldly abrupt in cutting his own son, Cyril (Thomas Doret), out of his life, to the point that he sells the boy's beloved bicycle and puts him into a group home. He provides an economic motive -- he can't afford to support the boy -- but refuses even to make contact with him. Nor do we learn what makes Samantha (Cécile de France) so willing not only to buy the boy's bike from the man Catoul sold it to but also to take the boy himself into her own life. After all, her first encounter with the enraged, belligerent child is in the waiting room of a clinic, where he clings to her for help as the attendants from the group home try to subdue him. She seems to have a settled life as a beautician with a handsome boyfriend. Why borrow such obvious trouble? I felt another literary influence at work in the film: Charles Dickens, who set his tales of rescued orphans like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield in the realistic context of 19th-century England. The Dardennes set their story about Cyril in the context of 21st-century Belgium's working-class suburbs. Like Oliver Twist, Cyril Catoul falls prey to the underworld: He is persuaded to take part in a robbery by a kind of Fagin, a gang leader who calls himself Wesker (Egon Di Mateo), after a character in the Resident Evil video game franchise. The Dardennes don't take a fully neorealist approach to the story the way they do in the only other film of theirs I've seen, Two Days, One Night (2014), which is a movie full of sympathy for those abused by capitalism. The Kid With the Bike is not an exposé, but rather a tribute to human kindness overcoming contemporary anomie. It is made plausible by the matter-of-fact approach of the Dardennes, but mostly by the performances, especially that of 13-year-old Doret, who had never acted before, but brings full conviction to every scene, including his rages and his hunger to be reunited with his father, as well as his eventual acceptance of Samantha's love and authority. The directors never milk a moment for sentiment: The only non-diegetic music on the soundtrack is the occasional punctuation at the end of a scene with a few bars from Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto, which has the tantalizing effect of keeping us suspended until the rest of the adagio is performed over the end credits.