Did I say Catherine Deneuve was the female Depardieu? I might correct myself and say Juliette Binoche is fast becoming him. But seeing her earlier this year in DANS PARIS, reminded me how much I like her, even if she is a bit...over-worked, we'll say, and that's why I'm looking forward to SUMMER HOURS. Even better news: this one's a comedy. Well, it's a French comedy.
IMDB says, "Two brothers and a sister witness the disappearance of their childhood memories when they must relinquish the family belongings to ensure their deceased mother's succession." But for a more flourishing synopsis, here are a few words from AFI:
Hélène (Edith Scob) gathers her children and grandchildren at her French country estate to celebrate her 75th birthday. Their gift of a tricky-to-use mobile phone, however, seems to symbolize the 21st-century pressures that are closing in on her precious way of life. The growing sense the exquisite Hélène—the niece of a famous artist—has of her own mortality leads her to bequeath her most valuable artwork and furniture to her closest family: her eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling), daughter Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier). Director Olivier Assayas’s gently beautiful meditation on connection and loss traces the journey of one family’s treasures from their home to their final resting place in glass cases, where they receive only the passing consideration of museumgoers (like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON [AFI FEST ’07], SUMMER HOURS was commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay to celebrate its 20th anniversary). As he did in his LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER, Assayas uses elliptical jumps in time and unexpected shifts in perspective to tell an ensemble story in oblique, multilayered fashion. Gradually, carefully, Assayas shows how family ties, even in decent and affectionate families, inevitably erode over time. The haunting late-afternoon melancholy is well served by Eric Gautier’s fluid camera and, combined with Assayas’s confident, inventive storytelling, makes SUMMER HOURS a bittersweet elegy about love and memory and the ways in which we hold them.
Trailer (in French): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzLvHaE64cQ
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