Assayas and Binoche in L’heure d’été
After seven weeks in Paris and the Val d’Oise, filming has wrapped up on L’heure d’été (“Summer Time”), Olivier Assayas’s latest feature after Boarding Gate [+see also:
trailer
film profile], his escapade in B movies, which had a midnight screening at Cannes in May.
The cast of his new feature – whose final week’s shoot is planned for October – includes Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier.
Conceived by Margo Films under the title of Souvenirs de Valois, the project is now being produced by MK2.
After Hsiao-hsien Hou’s The Flight of the Red Balloon [+see also:
trailer
film profile], selected in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (see article), L’heure d’été is the second film in a series initiated by Musée d’Orsay president Serge Lemoine to commemorate the institution’s 20th anniversary in 2006.
For the first time the Paris museum has opened its reserves and lent its works and furniture to the film, by hosting several days of filming in rooms closed off to the public.
L’heure d’été is the story of two brothers and a sister who witness the gradual disappearance of their childhood memories when they must relinquish the family belongings to ensure their deceased mother’s succession.
Assayas said that with this story he wanted, “as simply as possible, to recount a cycle similar to that of the seasons. We discover a lively, noisy family home, torn by the same passions as all families. Some months later, after the mother’s death, when the house has to be emptied and sold, its objects are weighed, judged, evaluated. The most precious will be used to solve the rights of succession. And it is in the rooms of the museum that we see these objects again, captives like animals in a zoo and stuck there, in this immortality that is also the best expression of a past life. The house now empty, the next generation, the teenagers, can have one last party and in this new beginning, reconstruct everything".
Produced by MK2, the €5m L’heure d’été includes pre-sales and co-production funding from France 3 Cinéma, participation from Canal+ and the Ile-de-France (€419,000).
MK2 is releasing the film theatrically in February 2008 and is also expected to handle world sales.
(Translated from French)
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