User reviews

SUMMER HOURS (L'heure d'été) is more of a reverie than a story for a film. This very French film touches the subject of family - the meaning and influence and contradictions - in an examination of coping with the death of the matriarch and her wishes versus the intentions of the siblings. Writer/Director Olivier Assayas seems less interested in allowing the viewer to get to know the individuals of the story than he is with conveying the vacuum of death and the aftermath of dealing with it in the setting of a family of grown children.

The film opens as it closes - in summer with scenes awash with French countryside living. Three children have gathered with their families for the 75th birthday of their mother, the elegant and wistful Hélène (Edith Scob) whose adoration of her famous painter uncle presses on her mind as she senses her own mortality. One son, Frédéric (Charles Berling) is her confidant in hearing her wishes about the dispersal of the house and furniture and art that mean so much to her. Her other son Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) has traveled from his new home in China where his tennis shoes company has stationed him: his fondness for his mother is apparent but his need for financing makes him view the wishes of his mother in a more practical light. Her daughter Adrienne (Juliet Binoche) has traveled from her preferred new home in New York City and views the wishes of her mother with a similar practical and somewhat distant stance.

Some time later the mother dies and the children gather for the funeral and for the discussion of what to do with the 'inheritance'. The interplay between the sentimental Frédéric and the pragmatic Adrienne and Jérémie bring about questions of placing the art and furniture with museums and the selling of the house of their youth. Gentle undertones of sibling relationships and questions about the quality of memorabilia versus the practicality of getting on with living provide the final movement. The film ends in a coda that returns the younger generation (Hélène's grandchildren) to the beauty of the gardens of the now empty French house. The thread that holds the film together is the presence of the longtime housekeeper Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan), the gentle being that understands it all.

Though the film is beautifully acted and photographed there is very little development of the various characters, a fact that leaves the viewer with the feeling of simply peeking through a windowpane to watch a French family walk through a moment in life and in death. Nothing much happens here: the film is more a reverie, but a very beautiful one to relax and enjoy. Grady Harp

Assayas says this film more or less sums up all his work so far, and that may surprise some, since it is so different, so indistinguishable in many ways from the work of other contemporary French filmmakers who deal with middle class life. And the impulse behind the film was something trivial and occasional, a request from the Musée d'Orsay to do something, as they'd asked Hou Hsiau-hsien (the result was Hou's 'Flight of the Red Balloon'). Hou's film uses the d'Orsay so incidentally I can hardly remember how it fits in; but Assayas takes the idea of a museum quite seriously and literally. His story is about a family, and a mother who dies in her mid-seventies leaving behind a house and a collection of museum pieces, works of art, furniture, and fine objects.

We begin with a scene quite conventional in French films: the seasonal family gathering. The 'Heure d'été' (summer hour), is a moment when adult siblings Adrienne (Juliette Binoche, the star of Hou's 'Balloon,' though including her again was not a d'Orsay requirement), Frédéric (Charles Berling, his third time in an Assayas film, and a kind of alter ego here), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) with parts of their families, have come to the family's beautiful country place to celebrate the 75th birthday of their mother Hélène (Edith Scob). Hélène is one of those perfectly slim, elegant, erect French women. She spends a lot of time telling Frédéric, to his annoyance, about the valuables the children will inherit when she dies, including a handsome 19th-century desk, display case, and other objects, the sketchbooks of her famous uncle, the artist Jean Berthier, two Corot paintings, and two large sketches by Odilon Redon. They will want to dispose of them all, she says, and the house. She has certain requirements. The D'Orsay wants the furniture; the sketchbooks must be kept together. Some objects she is giving to him.

After this sequence, Hélène is dead, perhaps a year later. She has gone to San Francisco for the start of a major traveling exhibition of Berthier's work, and there has been a presentation in France on his personal life (including the fact that he was gay, and other controversial information) which shook her considerably. And her involvement in the production of a book, a catalog, and the traveling exhibition all wore her down and left her devastated and empty when they were completed.

It is against Frédéric 's wishes, but when the siblings meet again, it's obvious Hélène was right and the possessions and the house must be sold, and the old housekeeper, Eloise (Isabelle Sadoyan) must be released. Jérémie, who works for a company that makes running shoes, is going to take his wife and kids to live in China permanently. Adrienne, who is a designer, lives in New York, and she's going to marry her American boyfriend and stay there. They can't go back to the country house regularly any more. It seems Frédéric gets a raw deal, because he, whom the dispersal of family heirlooms hurts the most, is going to have to deal with the nuts and bolts of the process, because he's the only one who lives in France. But that's the way it is, and what's more Jérémie needs money to set up in his new life in China.

Assayas goes into the details, even showing a meeting of the curators and administrators concerned with the donation at the Musée d'Orsay. They are particularly interested in the furniture and the Redons (the Corots are sold elsewhere). One official objects that these things will just go into storage.

This is a suavely composed picture, but it still comes across as the most elegant of instructional films, if such existed for showing at posh schools to teach children of the wealthy how to deal with inheritances in the world of globalization. Yes, globalization is what Assayas is talking about, though the word is used in his comments on the film, not in the screenplay itself. Assayas' didacticism this time is admirably straightforward, and at the same time, the ideas are presented in what for Assayas is an unusually warm context. One of the touchstones is the old housekeeper, Eloise, who returns to the house when it's been shut up, and goes to Hélène's grave to deposit flowers. The important point is that this is not about the traditional family squabble over inheritance. Though Frédéric is saddened, there is no argument, and he and Jérémie pointedly (maybe too pointedly) part friends. There are other little details that are accurate and practical. It's pointed out that Adrienne's plan to sell the sketchbooks in New York through Christie's won't work. The French government is unlikely to let them out of the country. Frédéric is away a lot too, and for whatever reason he has to pick up his teenage daughter, caught stealing, and holding pot. But the final scene, which again is warmly didactic, shows that daughter with her boyfriend and a bunch of her friends invading the old house one last time, saying a sad farewell..

As I'm not the first to comment, this is one of Assayas' simplest films, but it's also one of his most touching and meaningful. Instructional film though it may be, it deals with subject matter that can move the hardest heart. If you don't care about losing a parent, you will surely be touched with the thought of losing the places of your childhood--and family money. If love won't get you, money will. And there is a final meditation by Frédéric at the D'Orsay where he and his wife Lisa (Dominique Reymond) look at the objects they've donated (not in storage) and consider the other trade-off: a contribution to history and the public's culture has been made, but the objects are like prisoners now, shut up in a cold space, robbed of their human context in a family's life.

Hélène Berthier, niece of a famous painter, receive her children and grand children for her birthday, and take this opportunity to talk about her death, and what will happen to her uncle's collection. Once dead, Frederic, her elder son think that they'll keep the house as it his, but his brother and sister don't live in France anymore and think that it would more intelligent to sell. When I was expecting the family to be destroyed around this heritage, nothing like that happens, they all accept and the rarity in the 21 century of families having things that could belong to museums takes an end. This film is extremely beautiful, for many reasons. First because it can touch everyone who lost someone and saw what was theirs, being sold and put in many places. Then this film is beautiful because it shows also how everyone accepts that but also suffers from what they can't keep together: family, past, heritage! To me it shows better than any Amelie, or La Vie en Rose what being French means: being thorn between the heritage of a culture and an appeal of modernity, wanting to keep your roots alive and spread toward the world. This is funny how this thought came through my mind "Why do they want to live in Beijing or New York?" suddenly being in the film, that seemed weird to me when I just lived two years and a half in London, and probably won't stay in my old country forever. The actors are great, Edith Scob playing the extremely classy Hélène, and Charles Berling, Jeremy Regnier and Juliette Binoche are very touching and human. It's important to say, that the object are also characters in this story, and it's scary at the end to see them in the museum d'Orsay, how they lost life or are recovering some. It's important to say that this film was a project with the museum, and I think that it is brilliant to make us pay attention to the details of these objects when generally we're not. Question: is art made for museum or to live with it? People wouldn't try to steal them from museum if the answer was museums… If you want to see my other critics: http://www.silverparticules.blogspot.com

Interesting, gentle sad (but not depressing) story of the inevitability of loss and chance.

Three siblings decide whether to keep or sell their mother's country home and art collection after her death, exploring how we give 'things' meaning, and how that meaning changes due to context, generation, and what we need from them.

But while the ideas are intriguing, and the acting good it never quite reached the deepest level of feeling or thoughtfulness for me.

Called a masterpiece by a number of critics, and something close by others, I cant quite go there, but it is an intelligent, quietly moving experience, that I'll probably revisit yet again, since it grew on me on a second viewing.

My only previous Assayas' approach is Maggie Cheung's Cannes BEST ACTRESS nabbing feature CLEAN (2004, 7/10), and for most Chinese media, Assayas seems to alway been in an ill-fated personage as Maggie's ex-husband. But his works matures splendidly with finesse and sobriety (from CLEAN to SUMMER HOURS), the latter resounds a similar pace of meditation and quietude as Hirokazu Koreeda's STILL WALKING (2008, 8/10), tackles with a slice of family life, with a contemplation towards the domestic heredity, globalized opportunism, alienated generations and art conservation.

In dealing with a sentimental demise of a bourgeoisie matriarch, who resides in a suburban villa near Paris with all her uncle's art menagerie and his worthwhile sketching books (apparently he was a renowned painter himself and an unspeakable family secret), Assayas infills an indefatigable stamina to keep all the delicate matters in a civil restraint, the contradiction abounds among three siblings in regard to keep or sell the villa; and the proceedings of donating valuable art pieces has also been a bumpy road; for the elder son, he also has teenage children to worry about, and last but not the least, his abiding remembrance of the past is the most poignant blow to one who can fit into his shoes under the circumstances.

The show has never been slid into a thespians' melodrama notwithstanding the fact that its indulgence of a top-billing Gallic cast, a blonde Binoche incarnates a very light-touch casualness as the metropolitan daughter, living in USA and dedicates herself more in bringing the work of art abroad for the international exposure; Renier, the younger son, finds both an opportunity in settling down in China and an exigent situation in which the profit of selling the villa couldn't come as timely as possible. While these two are soon-to-be-goners, without a pinch yearning for their homeland, the liability all falls on the elder brother (Berling), whose true-to-life embodiment of his character anchors the film's backbone in a concrete formality, it is a prickly situation will come about to anyone eventually. Edith Scob, as the deceased mother, whose first 30-minutes appearance contrives to establish herself as an indomitable shadow encroached by the past, when she is gone, something else will be taken with her together and forever, Scob is pitch perfect in her role's demanding of the physical infirmity, an unswerving mind of knowing her time is up and the duty as a bequeather.

I have not conceal my preference to this quiet, reflective lifelike imitation than other more grandstanding razzle-dazzle, it is a simple film with a concise message delivered eloquently by the mastery of Assayas who auspiciously shoulders on the privilege of an auteur not only in the French terrain, but also as an international landmark, like many of his precedent compatriots.

Three adult siblings must decide what to do with their mother's house and collection of valuable art after her death in this melancholy but quite lovely film from Olivier Assayas.

"Summer Hours" really struck a chord with me, because I've just recently begun to see the results of aging in my own parents and am beginning in a real rather than abstract way to prepare myself for a time when I will not have them in my life. The film does wonders at conveying this particular family dynamic with very few moments of outright exposition; the first scene especially, a family gathering while the mother is still alive and wants to inform her children about what to do with her things when she passes, is a marvel of subtle nuances in both the writing and acting that clearly communicates the differences in the relationships between the mother and her three children. The oldest brother doesn't want to think about his mother's death in advance and wants to hold on to things after she's gone; the two younger children, living in different parts of the world, want to be rid of things as quickly and cleanly as possible. Yet the movie doesn't pass judgement on any of them, doesn't treat the oldest brother as a sentimental fool, nor the younger siblings as callously indifferent. It simply acknowledges the complexity of emotions involved in dealing with inanimate objects that represent years of a flesh-and-blood relationship.

Grade: A

In the early scenes of "Summer Hours," a 75-year-old French widow (Edith Scob), sensing that the end of her life is at hand, gathers her three adult children and their respective families together at their bucolic ancestral home to celebrate what she believes may be her final birthday. Though a proud mother and a dutiful wife, Helene Bertier has really lived her whole life dedicated to preserving the work and the memory of her uncle, a famous, well-respected painter (there are indications that there may have been more to their relationship than what was apparent on the surface). Two of her three children have scattered to the far-flung corners of the globe - Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) to New York City and Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) to China - while the oldest, Frederic (Charles Berling), alone of the three, remains in France. When the day of her passing finally arrives, the three siblings are faced with the universal dilemma of clinging to the past by holding onto the family estate with all the memories it contains or of selling it off and moving on with their lives.

"Summer Hours" is a beautifully realized film that captures the truths of familial relationships in subtle and knowing terms. The film has an unforced, spontaneous feel to it, due in large part to the lack of contrived plotting, the lifelike dialogue, the understated performances and the spontaneous, naturalistic style of film-making director Olivier Assayas has employed in service of the material. Though very little "happens" in the conventional narrative sense of the term, the film is never static because Assayas has made the camera an intimate though unobtrusive observer of the scene. We feel as if we are eavesdropping on these people, while, at the same time, becoming deeply involved with their lives and story. Even the conflicts that inevitably arise among the siblings are executed with amazing restraint and precision, completely devoid of the kind of hyperbole and histrionics that seem to blight so many "family dramas."

The movie captures the sad reality that sometimes when a person's life is over, all that's left behind to commemorate that life is an assortment of "things," things that come to have less and less value to each succeeding generation as the personal meanings and memories associated with them recede with time. Yet, in the final scene there is a brief but poignant hint that there is still a continuity that runs through the generations, binding them together in shared experience, no matter how tenuous that connection may appear to the casual observer.

Superb performances and artful direction make "Summer Hours" a treat in any season.

I love beautiful art. I even love controversial art such as the Pompidou Center. Plus I am definitely in love with Juliette Binoche and the Orsay Museum. So could I not love this movie? I do, I do, I do.

Here is my summary. The French constantly smoke and drink plus they never exercise and still they live longer than we, Americans. Did I mention that they smoke a lot? Another interesting observation is that even the rich'n'famous in France do not enjoy the conveniences that we, Americans, take for granted (nice kitchens, appliances, etc.).

Vive la France!

L'heure d'été (2008) written and directed by Olivier Assayas, was shown in the U.S. as "Summer Hours." It's a very French film--beautiful to look at, extremely artistic and sophisticated, with realistic dialog and a quiet, thoughtful plot.

The film opens with a flashback of three young children running through a beautiful rural estate, and ends with (older) children running through the same estate. The home and grounds belong to Hélène, who is being visited by her three grown children. Hélène is played by the remarkable and attractive Edith Scob. Hélène lives in the house with her housekeeper and companion, Éloïse. Éloïse is played by veteran actor Isabelle Sadoyan. Ms. Sadoyan is in her 80's, and she adds a solid, rural presence to the film. It's not that she's slow--she's as quick and intelligent as any of the family members. However, they are intellectuals and she's not. She's shrewd, dedicated, and able to manage problems with equanimity.

The plot revolves around the need to decide the fate of the house and grounds. The three siblings have different views about the decision. Each has to balance money to be acquired immediately if they sell, as opposed to keeping the house in the family for use by their children. Although they have diametrically opposed views, they deal with the situation in a mature, caring fashion, and majority rules.

This is a peaceful, thoughtful film. There's no obvious climax or denouement. However, the decision the siblings make will forever alter their lives, and the lives of their children.

The sister in the trio of siblings is played by Juliette Binoche. Whenever she appears in a film, we assume it's a "Juliette Binoche film." That's incorrect in this case. She's a strong presence, and an excellent actor, but this is an ensemble film, and her performance doesn't stand out from the others.

"Summer Hours" will work better on a large screen, because of the incredible beauty of the setting. However, it's still worth seeing if it's available on DVD.