Film

Summer Hours (L'Heure D'Ete)

Cert: 12A

Description: Meditation on grief, revolving around the matriarch of a middle-class family, whose ailing health provides the catalyst for a reunion, bringing together her three children - Frederic, Adrienne and Jeremie - to ponder the future. While Adrienne and Jeremie live and work abroad and therefore have little interest in maman's house and its collection of priceless objet d'art, Frederic hopes to keep the property and its contents safely under his control. Unfortunately, death duties and his siblings' indifference threaten to leave poor Frederic with an inheritance of nothing but fading memories.

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Dir: Olivier Assayas.

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jeremie Renier, Edith Scob

Country: Fr.

Year: 2008.

Duration: 102mins

Summer Hours is a gentle reminder

Bringing Renoir back: Summer Hours

By Derek Malcolm
17 Jul 2008

A family gather round their elderly mother (Edith Scob) in her country house. She is the heiress to her uncle's art collection, which includes paintings by Degas and Corot and other exceptional 19th-century art. When she dies, Frederic (Charles Berling) is reluctantly put in charge of selling both the property and the art. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jeremie (Jeremie renier), her other children, readily agree.

Olivier Assayas's film, beautifully played, is an atmospheric and sensitive treatise on loss, heritage and memory. Are the family right to give up both the house and its treasures to raise money? Or should they honour their mother by keeping her treasures and settling their obvious differences? Assayas makes this an almost Chekhovian study, and one that reminds us gently and persuasively of the films of the great renoir.