Review: Summer Hours: Criterion Blu-ray Edition

Summer Hours: Criterion Blu-ray Edition  |  Director Olivier Assayas  |  Score: 7.0

In Olivier Assayas’ brooding film, places and things hold the utmost importance and interest. Very specific things. A Degas sculpture. A pair of vases. A writing desk. All the debris we accumulate in the course of our busy and maddening lives, collected in heaps and platters and spread out through the reaches of our houses.

The house in specific question here is a gorgeous summer home in the French countryside just outside Paris. It belongs to Hélène (Edith Scob), the winsome matriarch of a large family of three grown children, eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling), an economist in Paris; middle child Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), an artist in New York; and youngest son Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), a rising international businessman based in China; and their respective spouses and families. As the film begins, we are actually witnessing the house’s last hurrah — the whole family together to celebrate Hélène’s 75th birthday. It is a happy occasion, but Hélène doesn’t miss the opportunity to begin the messy process of estate distribution with Frédéric. Their uncle was a formidable and renowned artist in his own right, and the summer house is summarily filled with artistic bric-a-brac. After Hélène dies — notably off camera and only referenced after the fact — the three children are left with the potentially divisive task of figuring out just what to do with everything.

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Intriguingly, the film does not move in the kind of hallowed melodramatic turns you would come to expect, given the set up. There aren’t showdowns between characters, or tortured anguish amongst the siblings as age-old rivalries bubble up to the surface. In fact, the siblings all get along remarkably well. The film isn’t really interested in its characters, per se, we never get much of a sense of them beyond a kind of cursory glance. Instead, the film is preoccupied with the concept of our personal artifacts, and what can be done with them after we shed this mortal coil. When the decision is made, to the dismay of all involved, to sell the house and donate as many items as possible to French art museums, we are left with a tangible sadness. One set of lives is over, the film suggests, and the next generation will have to go ahead on their own.

In addition to a gorgeous transfer, this Criterion BD disc also offers up interviews with director Assayas, Berling and Binoche and an hour-long doc on the film’s extensive art on display.

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Piers Marchant is a Philly-based writer and editor, and the EIC film critic.

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