Parting, such sweet sorrow

A desk, a vase, a painting, a house -- these things are, well, just things. But in his latest film, “Summer Hours,” French writer-director Olivier Assayas explores the meaning we derive from the material objects in our lives and the emotional currency we invest in these items.

Three siblings (played by Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jeremie Renier) must decide what to do with the family country house and its contents -- including museum-worthy furniture, accessories and paintings -- after their mother unexpectedly passes away.

Assayas’ last three features -- “Demonlover,” “Clean,” and “Boarding Gate” -- formed an unofficial trilogy of globe-hopping internationalist films grappling with the onset of globalization and expansion of technology, full of anxiety, paranoia and a certain sense of fin de siecle decadence. “Summer Hours,” which opened in New York City on Friday and opens in Los Angeles on May 29, relocates many of those same concerns and ideas to a gentler story that at times seems like a stereotypical French garden-party drama. With the three siblings spread across three continents, each brings individual concerns to the dissolution of the family home, and the film is in some way a sharp distillation of the bumper-sticker ideology to “think globally, act locally.”

“For me at least, cinema is a window on the world,” Assayas said at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival. “And it’s a window on how the world is changing, and basically I think it’s the purpose of cinema to try to capture those changes, to capture the way the world is constantly changing.”

The film began as a commission as part of a series of short films by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, to celebrate the museum’s 20th anniversary in 2006. Though that project ultimately fell apart -- the recent film “The Flight Of The Red Balloon” by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien also had its origins in the Musee d’Orsay project -- Assayas expanded upon the idea he had for how art objects are removed from their real-life uses when placed in a museum.

Among the most heartbreaking moments in “Summer Hours” are when objects once seen amid the clutter and chaos of a family home are glimpsed again behind glass and cordoned off within a museum, as sad and lonely as an animal in cage. Perhaps, Assayas seems to ask, even objects can have soul.

“Which is a very abstract idea,” he said, “but somehow it echoed a lot in me. So when the Musee d’Orsay project was canceled, I stayed with his idea which I kind of liked, and I slowly realized if I wanted to develop it in any coherent way I would have to deal with something I had not really dealt with before, which is family.”

Assayas knew his mother did not have long to live as he was writing the script, and she passed away a few months before the start of shooting. This brought the feelings of loss and generational change in the script he was working on even more to the fore.

“All of a sudden this movie that initially started out as a kind of commission became a very intimate project dealing with these issues,” Assayas explained.

Assayas, now 54, began his career as a critic for the famous French film journal Cahiers du Cinema before transitioning to screenwriting, notably working on the scripts for director Andre Techine’s “Rendez-vous” (1985) and “Scene of the Crime” (1986). Though his early films “A New Life” (1993) and “Cold Water” (1994) garnered attention on the festival circuit, it was “Irma Vep,” his moody, stylish 1996 riff on filmmaking, that made him something of an American critics’ darling and brought him limited art-house success.

Since then Assayas’ films have received spotty exposure in the United States, mostly sticking to film festivals, victims of changes in the business of distributing foreign-language films. Where once French filmmakers such as Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer could enjoy a certain level of respectability and stability with their films in America, just as reflected in Assayas’ films, times have changed.

“I don’t think, given the time, there was any way he could have that kind of connection with American audiences,” said New York-based critic Kent Jones, who until recently was a programmer at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “If he had been 10 years older and had been making movies, it would be a different story.”

In one of the first English-language surveys of the filmmaker’s work, published in 1996, Jones wrote, “Assayas may be the only filmmaker who gives us the poetics of the digital age in all its mean perfection.”

In the years since, Assayas’ deep connection to the blurring evolution of how people relate to one another has only become more sensitively felt and expressed. With “Summer Hours,” he manages to fixate the globalist ideas of his recent work onto a decidedly French framework, crafting a moving meditation on families moving forward into an uncertain future.

Said Jones: “He definitely is the guy who has got his eye on the ball when it comes to what it feels like to live in the world right now.”

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