"Summer Hours" opens, as so many French films do, with a major family reunion at a marvelous old house in the country. But while the setting is familiar, even Chekhovian, what writer-director Olivier Assayas does with it is not.
Assayas, whose credits include "Clean," "Demonlover" and "Irma Vep," is not the type to do things as usual, or even do anything classically French. So it is a pleasant surprise to see him working in a naturalistic form but bringing his own particular sensibility to it.
For "Summer Hours" turns out to be global as well as personal, a family drama with a larger point. While the film is elegiac in the best sense, concerning itself with what the passage of time does to a family, it also takes on broader questions about the disintegration of both a culture and the society that supports it.
None of this is visible when the film starts on a fine summer's day, at a country house to die for, some 50 minutes outside of Paris. Children are playing, dogs are barking, the aging cook is grumbling -- it all feels very much like business as usual for a warm afternoon. Only it isn't.
The three adult children and their own kids gathered for their mother's 75th birthday party not only rarely see one another, they are rarely in the same country. Jeremie (Dardennes brothers regular Jeremie Renier) works for a multinational shoe company in China. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is a designer who's based in New York. It's only Frederic (Charles Berling), an economist and academic, who lives and works in France.
Though her birthday is the nominal cause of the gathering, mother Helene (Edith Scob, whose career dates back to 1960's cult classic "Eyes Without a Face") has her own agenda. She wants to talk to Frederic, the only son in France, about what she wants to be done with the house and its furnishings after she's dead.
For this is not your run-of-the-mill beautiful country house. It belonged to Helene's uncle, Paul Berthier, a well-known painter, and it is filled with the paintings and furnishings he collected over a lifetime of friendship with some of France's great artists.
Despite that, and despite Helene's passion for the house, she insists to Frederic that it and everything in it be disposed of after her death. The children are scattered, they lead lives of their own, and she doesn't want the house to be a burden. Frederic, who is passionate about the house, disagrees, insisting it should be passed down intact to the next generation.
