Was initially deeply suspicious of whether one absurdly magnetic subject — the filmmaker’s grandmother, an Austrian countess with zero filter — could sustain a film otherwise populated by her upper-class relatives lounging around a Provençal pool. But Hely-Hutchinson (!) has constructed something subtle and honest, a film that patiently accumulates meanings as summers blur seamlessly into one another. In the absence of obvious temporal markers — pop culture, technology, news — it’s unclear how much time is passing; it only dawned on me when the sister appears in some awful spray-on jeans that we must, in fact, be some years back. The villa seems to exist outside time, though it’s that very quality that makes time’s effect on the body so pronounced: skin sagging, wrinkles deepening, hair growing and thinning; the brother’s accumulating tattoos; a baby bump; granny’s obsession with how much weight everyone has put on. The family’s unfussiness about nudity is such a blessing in this sense. There’s plenty of tough stuff amidst the absurd, though Hely-Hutchinson smartly lets this sit at the edges of the central matrilineal dynamic rather than milking it for sentiment.
