“Summer Hours”

On March 5, 2008, the French film L’heure d’été (Summer Hours) was released.  The film is now being shown in the United States.

Simply stated, the plot involves two brothers and a sister who “witness the disappearance of their childhood memories when they must relinquish the family belongings to ensure their deceased mother’s succession.”

This film recently received a highly favorable review from A.O. Scott, Sorting Out an Inheritance: Three Siblings Dissect the Stuff of Life, NY Times, May 15, 2009.  Here are some excepts from this review:

In a literal, almost banal sense, Olivier Assayas’s “Summer Hours” is a movie about an inheritance. Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob), a silver-haired matriarch enthroned among her children and grandchildren at the beginning of the film, leaves behind a charming country house and a cherished art collection, and her heirs, as is normal, must figure out what to do with it all after her death.

Hélène’s eldest son, Frédéric (Charles Berling), wants to keep everything as it is, so that the next generation can gather at the old place and appreciate Grandma’s stuff. But Frédéric’s sister, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and their younger brother, Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), who live abroad (she in the United States, he in China with his wife and three children), would rather sell the house and most of what is in it, donating the best of the paintings, pieces of furniture and sundry knickknacks to the Musée d’Orsay.

That, in a nutshell, is the dramatic arc of this extraordinary film, which, in spite of its modest scale, tactful manner and potentially dowdy subject matter, is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication. And this is only fitting, since one of Mr. Assayas’s themes is the way that inanimate things accrue value, sentimental and otherwise — the curious alchemy that transforms certain objects into art.

Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this movie to my attention.