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Overrated and overhyped

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

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.

"Summer Hours" begins, appropriately, with hordes of children running joyfully through a garden. They're on a treasure hunt, following a map written in invisible ink.Director Olivier Assays then introduces us to Helene Berthier, an elderly woman whose children and grandchildren have gathered at her home in rural France. Helene was once romantically linked to a character called Paul, a now dead artist who was renowned for his paintings.Helene's home is filled with both Paul's work (a vast collection of priceless art) and more mundane personal items which nevertheless have tremendous sentimental value. One photograph, for example, features an older generation of Berthiers sitting at a table exactly as the current generation are. As the film unfolds, Assayas lays the groundwork for various heavy themes: the way what we "treasure" changes as we age, how art and objects tie people to the past, the relationship between art, globalisation and commerce, the seemingly arbitrary and shifting "value" of objects, the question of what defines art and what makes art meaningful, how spaces are "deterritorialized" and "reterritorialized" under capitalism, how objects transform as they move from space to space etc etc. You might say this is the "rural" version of Assayas's "Demonlover", "Clean" and "Boarding Gate", but whilst those films focused on the way humans are stripped, sold, traded and pushed around under techno-capitalism, "Summer Hours" focuses almost entirely on man's fluctuating relationship with both inanimate objects and product.Early in the film, Helene reveals the reason for calling a family assembly: she wants to discuss the fate of the family estate after her death. Frederic, Helene's eldest son, is an economist, and is the only family member who wishes (for sentimental reasons) to hold on to the estate and its artwork. Daughter Adrienne (a product designer) and younger son Jeremie (who works for a mega corporation in Shaghai) both want to sell the estate. It's of no value to them, they won't be able to visit it as they work far abroad, and it simply isn't economical to maintain. Frederic doesn't agree with them at first, but gradually the practical needs of commerce infringe on his desire to hold on to the past. Reluctantly he agrees with them. Significantly, Adrienne, the product of a system which destroys the past and sells nostalgic copies, makes tacky ceramic ornaments based on the designs of her uncle. Assayas stresses that the children are all ultra-modern bourgeois, part of a "new France" that is beholden to the demands of the global market and that is gradually losing ties with its traditions and heritage. Casual remarks highlight this theme: characters speaking of new companies popping up in their village, once taboo romantic relationships accepted as the norm, the fact that Adrienne lives in two of the citadels of Global Capitalism (New York and Japan), the fact that Jeremie is moving his family to China to better manage a mass production shoe factory and the mention that Jeremie's children will learn English and not speak French (thereby cutting them off from their cultural roots). Ironically, it's the one economist in the family who can't cope with the way his family, culture and historical treasure trove are being torn apart. Frederic frequently states that he believes the "economy as a functional system" is a myth. He recognises that economism is the new global religion, in which the world is reordered in the service of irrational and incessant growth. The dominant theology of this religion is neo-liberalism, which aims to make the whole world a single market, national boundaries no longer a factor in economic affairs. Unlike most religions, economism looks to growth for salvation, salvation being "freedom" from poverty and the ills that accompany it. When it is pointed out that the "new religion" has not in fact done much toward reducing poverty, believers are told that they must be more faithful to the precepts of the religion. Of course while the believers wait, the machine's greed outgrows the capacity of the real economy to satisfy. In response, the great centres of finance get the governments of the world to make available to them, by privatisation, all of their possessions. But still this does not suffice! How could it? Debt based Ponzi schemes cannot be satiated. And so the market becomes increasingly abstract, debts ignored or traded as "value" whilst virtual economies balloon to something like five times the size of the "real" economy. The end result is the world Assayas' characters find themselves in: groundless and always moving to keep the whole sham from collapsing.In one scene, Frederic proudly displays paintings for his children, telling them that one day the collection will be all theirs. But though his kids look up at the artwork with indifference, implying that they are "cut off" from the "treasures of the past", Assayas is careful to show that Frederic is himself deluded, unable to look upon the pictures without bias. His pleasure is clearly less about the aesthetic qualities of art/past, than it is about family legacy, memory and the continuation of a family history. His children, able to look at the paintings without bias, simply dismiss them as old-fashioned. The result is that the film manages to mourns the obliteration/repackaging of the past whilst also questioning if anything is really being lost. Does the worth of an object reside only in the historical and familial remembrances of concerned individuals?The film ends with a sequence which mirrors its first shot. Here Helene's granddaughter looks on at the abandoned family home, trying but failing to position her body such that it recreates a "painting of the place" that Paul once did. It's a deeply sad ending; no longer connected by shared place or possessions, the modern subject is both adrift and defined by loss. 8.9/10 – A great film, though perhaps too word oriented.

This movie opens with Hélène (Edith Scob in a fine performance) at her country home in France, in the company of her three children. There is a daughter, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) who lives in New York, a son who lives in China, and another son who is still in France. The story is told in two parts: at the opening gathering when Hélène, age 75, is enjoying the reunion; then less than a year later as the children gather for Hélène's funeral and the ensuing discussion among them about what will happen with her possessions.Such stories happen thousands of times a day, but each one is unique and this movie details one such in a straightforward way such that you get to know the characters involved, the tensions among them, and what motivates the decisions each makes. If you are expecting high drama or heavy sentimentality, you will not find it here. Rather you will find caring, intelligent people trying to resolve issues in a civil manner. As is often the case upon a death in the family certain topics are discussed that have never been openly brought up before.In the first part of the movie Hélène contemplates her mortality and anticipates what will happen after her death. I found Hélène to be a very sympathetic and insightful person. She has such thoughts as, "A lot of things will be leaving with me. memories, secrets, stories that interest no one anymore," and, commenting on an accident that happened when her kids were young that resulted in the destruction of a valuable sculpture she says, "It's sad, but that's life." In thinking about her children Hélène thinks to herself, "They have lives of their own. Their concerns aren't mine." She thinks such things more as matters of fact rather than as regrets. If you are of a certain age, this film will make you think about what of significance will remain of you after your death. At best for most of us, in a few generations our lives will be but a marker in someone's genealogy.There are some wonderful scenes filmed with subtly. When her children leave after the visit in the first part of the movie, Hélène is seen slowly walking alone up the steps to her house. The contrast from the chaos of the goodbyes to solitude is strikingly done. And when Hélène enters the house, we see in the background a warmly lighted room, but Hélène chooses to sit quietly in a darkened room. This is filmed in a pale blue light that accentuates the poignancy of Hélène's thoughts. The housekeeper's final visit to the house is quite moving and masterfully done.A couple of Hélène's grandchildren and their friends play significant roles. The presentation of the generational transitions from Hélène's world to that of her children and then to her grandchildren's generation is nicely done. Some things change, some things stay the same, life goes on.I think that if you wind up not liking this movie, it will not be because of the casting, the acting, or the filming.

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.