Summer Hours is a quiet family drama about adult children dealing with the end of an important chapter in their lives.
At their summer house in the French countryside, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) and Frederic (Charles Berling) gather to celebrate their mother's 75th birthday.
Mother (Edith Scob) is sharp, healthy and somewhat controlling, and she's intent upon reminding Frederic about the important antiques and paintings in the house. Mother has spent much of her time preserving the memory and the work of her famous uncle, a painter who also collected important pieces of furniture and other items.
She knows her own children might not be interested in keeping everything, so she wants Frederic -- her only child still living in France -- to know which items are important.
And what about the house itself? It's so beautiful, and it contains both cherished family memories and important cultural artifacts -- but it's isolated and rarely used.
Adrienne lives permanently in America. Jeremie is probably going to live in China with his young family. Who will even use the summer house once mother is gone?
It's impossible to see Summer Hours without assuming that the house represents France itself.
In the house are peace, beauty, signs of intellectual pursuit and items of huge cultural importance, but there are few left who appreciate any of it, and outside, the world is changing rapidly.
(Near the end of the movie, when the teenaged grandchildren of the family hold a big party at the house, all that quiet gives way to a raucous crowd of kids, of all ethnicities, who smoke dope and play loud music. It's almost as if the house is under siege; should we worry that this is some veiled comment on racial and social change in France?)
Summer Hours manages to present an intricate family structure and complex relationships within this story about what we treasure, and why. The three grown-up children pick their way through various emotional land mines in the process of deciding whether or not to keep the house, and their different opinions never threaten a certain family unity. In the end, however, they will physically go their separate ways.
Though there are many precious items under discussion in Summer Hours, two glass vases of some value are overlooked by the children. They are identified as worthwhile by experts; one vase goes to a museum and the other to a faithful housekeeper, who has no knowledge of the vase's monetary value. For her, the vase has only sentimental value.
The fate of these two objects is the heart of the movie: One is in what the filmmaker calls a zoo for things, and the other remains part of a household where it is useful and cherished.
Summer Hours is a slow, beautifully photographed film about what we value -- in the emotional and material realms. The movie is in French, with English subtitles.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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