
The movie opens at a family gathering at the country home of the aged but still beautiful matriarch Hélène (played by the veteran actress Edith Scob). It's a beautiful day, and Hélène, her faithful housekeeper (Isabelle Sadoyan), her three adult kids (played by Assayas' favorite leading man, Charles Berling; Juliette Binoche, in a blonde dye job that takes some getting used to; and Jérémie Renier) and their kids sit in the bright sunshine or run around in the fields while Assayas and his cinematographer Eric Gautier (who also shot A Christmas Tale, a family-gathering movie that could eat this one for breakfast) do everything to make you feel wistful about it all short of parade in front of the camera wearing sandwich boards reading "Youth and Beauty Are as Fleeting as Summer Itself!" When the sunblock runs out, everybody can wander into the house and admire mom's vast collection of paintings, antique furniture, and other artworks, which include the sketchbooks of Hélène's uncle, an artist named Paul Berthier. After this long opening section introduces the actors and establishes whatever character traits they're going to have to work with, Hélène dies, and the movie can settle into the real dramatic work at hand: deciding what to do with mom's stash of collectibles.
You might think that the movie is so taken with the idea that a human being's life comes down to the hoarded belongings she's left behind has something to do with how French it is, and you wouldn't entirely be wrong. (It sure sounds classier, coming from Assayas and his characters, than it does from Nick Hornby's boyish men.) Actually, it was the starting point of the movie because the movie was originally commissioned as part of a plan to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Musée d'Orsay. (So was Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, which included scenes set inside the museum, and which also featured Juliette Binoche being especially lively in dubious-looking hair.) The actors get to express little irritations with those playing their siblings and to cry over the loss of mom and fret over their kids, but the core of the movie is in scenes where curators from the Musée d'Orsay stamp around the house and discuss how badly they want mom's knickknacks (which are in fact pieces on loan to the filmmakers from the museum) and set aside a moment to tear their hair out when they think about those barbarians at Christie's. (Bincohe, who lives in New York, has flirted with the idea of selling the sketchbooks to Christie's, before coming to her senses.) At the end, there's a set piece that's a sort of inverted version of the opening scene, with Berling's teenage daughter taking over grandma's all-but-abandoned house for a weekend party with all her little buddies, who have their whole lives ahead of them and seem very confused by this, maybe because they haven't yet begun to whole-heartedly devote themselves to building their own stockpile of objets d'art and attaching personal memories to them. But Assayas isn't fooling anybody: he's at least as much in his element when the curators are sitting around being huffy about the quality of Art Nouveau furniture they're being offered as when he's trying to stage scenes depicting intimate human behavior. Summer Hours is probably opening about three months too early: who wants to feel wistful about the dying of the light in May? But it is strongly recommended for those who are counting the seconds between episodes of Antiques Roadshow.
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