In Victoria Hely-Hutchinson’s documentary Vacances, time is measured by changing bodies. As the summers roll by over the course of nine years, lines in backs deepen, wrinkles once taut become papery and tremulous, flesh fills out for some and sallows for others. What ought to be a document of happiness annexed from the strains of everyday life — a simple summer holiday — becomes in Hely-Hutchinson’s hands a tender stock of her vibrant family’s growth, for better or worse. Vacances is a sweet meditation on family and all the hurts and joys accumulated through the cruel, persistent linearity of time.
The film begins on, and indeed revolves around, Granny, Hely-Hutchinson’s family’s matriarch. Granny has lived a lavish, sensual, and grand life, and lazing on a sunchair with a plate of bread and cheese on her chest in her home in the idyllic South of France, she recalls her lovers. Granny is married, of course, but she doesn’t believe in monogamy, and took many lovers. She has fostered an openness and frankness among her family; free to be herself, especially in her own home, she often walks around topless. Hely-Hutchinson and her younger sister Lucy do likewise. There is also Teddy, Hely-Hutchinson and Lucy’s younger brother, and the siblings’ mother, Pipi, Granny’s eldest daughter, who appear throughout the summers. There is also Grandpa, who doesn’t talk much, but who swims often and sleeps in the sun, playing with Hely-Hutchinson’s infant daughter when she arrives a few years into the film’s summers.
The immediate impression of Vacances is one of sleepy, sunbaked languor: everyone is surrounded by fresh fruit, good wine, a clean pool, stony warm bugs, and the easy, intuitive familiarity and comfort of immediate family. Time feels as endless as the sun is warm. But time isn’t endless and family is hardly ever perfect. As her family lounge around, Hely-Hutchinson prods them to psychological rumination, her camera never faltering when fights or arguments break out, when talks need to be had about what is to be done about Teddy and his troubles, or Lucy and her anxiety. Pipi offers her psychologically incisive opinions about growing up with as vibrant a woman as Granny, who would often leave every space she occupied airless, a suffocating state of affairs for a daughter who feels, even after raising three children, unable to escape Granny’s shadow.
Watching Vacances feels like watching a home video — the film is familiar and comfortable, honest for depicting the bad alongside the good, and suffused with love. Hely-Hutchinson’s gaze never feels intrusive, her camera often siting at the corner of the pool or in corners of rooms, watching as the vibrant family has silly arguments or cracks jokes. Often, she watches her family members with a smiling curiosity, like a hug: Teddy is always working out, Lucy is always sunbathing, Pipi sleeps with an eye mask on to keep the sun’s brightness at bay, and Granny does it all, moving through the house with a plan only she is privy to.
In its watching, the film offers us the beautiful, complex story of the director’s family, how one woman, Granny, has created an at once loving and warm family but also one so irrevocably molded by her titanic personality. Granny has done a good job, for the most part — we see, year after year, the family always comes together, no matter the personal tragedies they experience outside of the summertime.
As time, both endless and not, goes on, the women in Granny’s family grow from children to adults, to parents, to grandparents, and Granny grows, too, leaning more steadfastly into the parts of her personality that might have prompted Hely-Hutchinson to begin the film in the first place. Vacances is a love letter to the director’s family, and is about how we are shaped by these nebulous and exciting and exhausting relations. But it is also an ode to time, its ability to hurt and to heal as it walks us through age. Vacances is a towering achievement for how it reminds us of the privilege of growing old around those we love. One wishes that the film might continue, until the end of time, but for now we can rest assured in the knowledge that this beautiful family will always find its way back to Granny’s home.
DIRECTOR: Victoria Hely-Hutchinson; DISTRIBUTOR: Self-distributed; IN THEATERS: October 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 20 min.
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