This is the second and half film by Olivier Assayas that I’ve watched. The first was L’Eau froide, which is about a groupe of anti-culture, delinquent, hippie youngsters, and the half is Clean, featuring his ex-wife Maggie Cheung, one of the most chic actress of the last generation.
I was attracted to watch the film because its plot discusses the globalization situating in France where strong national identity has been signiture of its citizens. It turns out the film’s theme is really cultural objects and their history and memories. The main contradiction in the film, therefore, is not inter-national, but between the global and the local, i.e., between the reifying, universalizing capital and the local, personal resistance to this violence. The heritage of the mother, and thereby Paul Bertheir the uncle, has a plural of values and meanings: for the elder son in Paris, this is a sacred memorial of nolstalgia and beauty, for the junior son moving to China, the heritage is of great manetary value that he has a right of; for the daughter doing art-related works and publications in the U.S., these are artistic objects of aesthetic significance that she could help to arrange their fate into the market of artworks and precious gift for her own aesthetics, for the maid in house, these are just everyday objects that she have lived and worked with — ironically, when she is asked to select one object from all of the objects for her own memorial, she unknowingly selects an ordinary, functional vase that was appraised to be one of the most valuable by the connoisseurs.
At the end of the film, the elder son and his wife meet his mother’s desk, which was also used by his great uncle, in the musée d’Orsay, on a pedestral at a distance, and one of their vase in a exhibition case with many other vases of the same style and period, the objects’ aura stripped, the personal usurped by the historical. The work of art is elevated and relegated at the same time.
Yet the moment i liked most was the very ending, when the house itself, now looted empty out of all the valuable objects, is impending to be sold, the daughter of the elder son asks him to let her hold a great party with her friends in the house before it is sold. This youngster’s party is the signiture of Assayas’s film, like the one in L’eau froide and many other of his films (as I heard). In the party, the old house is like a skeleton. The old contents have been purged at all. Yet it is not a deconstruction, but a resurrection with new energy and vitality. The film ended in the garden with the daughter telling her friend of the stories once happening in this house that her grandmother liked telling her. The denouement delivered such a promise that while the objects of the old days have undergone disenchantment and alienation, some kernel of the beauty of the old days are still living or passing on.
正片
