Review of Summer Hours (2008) by Rod A — 24 May 2009

[i]Summer Hours[/i] begins with Helene's 75th birthday celebration at her gorgeous country estate outside of Paris. In attendance are her three grown children -- 45-year-old Frederic, a published economist who lives in Paris, his younger sister Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), an unmarried housewares designer who lives in New York City, and the baby of the family, Jeremie, who works for Puma (of sneaker fame) in China -- and their families.

It's one of those scenes that so many French films seem to have -- the whole family gathered outside around a great big table drinking wine and eating course after course of delicious food for what appears to be hours -- that makes me wish that I was French...and rich...and had a mansion in the country...and belonged to a family that could spend more than fifteen minutes together without a major fight erupting.

The kids chip in and give Helene a cordless phone and a warm shawl -- pretty chintzy group gifts if you ask me -- and then head back to their respective lives, but not before Helene insists on giving Frederic a rundown of all of her various priceless antiques and artwork with the instruction that he and his sibs should feel free to sell the whole lot when she eventually checks out.

"Oh don't be silly", Frederic says, but the next thing you know he's picking out a burial plot and the three kids are sitting around his kitchen table discussing the disposition of Mom's assets. Frederic assumes that they all want to keep Helene's house as a summer retreat, but Jeremie is planning to buy a vacation house in Bali to escape the harsh Beijing winters and Adrienne announces that she's about to marry her boyfriend whose family lives in Denver, so neither of them anticipate getting back to France very much. So since Frederic can't afford to buy them out, the house -- and all of its valuable contents -- gets put on the market.

Much of the rest of the film deals with fairly tedious matters involving tax lawyers, real estate agents, museum curators, and art collectors. These are interspersed with subplots about Frederic's recently-published, poorly-received economics book, his pot-smoking teenage daughter's shoplifting arrest, and speculation that Helene's relationship with her long-dead, much-adored, famous-artist uncle involved more than what's normally categorized as avuncularity.

For me, all of the discussions about which artist made which vase and why this armoire is an important piece were dreadfully boring. Perhaps I'm just a boor, but I tend to sprint through the furniture and housewares sections of art museums; if I wanted to look at desks I'd go to IKEA. The sole reason that I was able to keep my focus as I watched one person after another examine precious glass vases was my own self-generated tension stemming from the fear that at any moment, someone was going to accidentally drop one and it was going to be that classic "Mom always says, don't play ball in the house" episode of the Brady Bunch all over again. I hope I'm not giving too much away when I say that all of my worrying was for naught.

I sort of expected a bit more tension of the un-imaginary sort, especially since Frederic really doesn't want to sell the house, but there's actually only one minor tiff between the brothers and it's followed in short order by hugs and espressos. Frederic is really the only one of the siblings who shows any emotion at all; the other two don't appear to have a sentimental bone in their collective bodies.

The only character I really sympathized with was Eloise, Helene's live-in cook and housekeeper, who not only lost her long-time companion, but is also forced to move out of the place that's been her home for many years. Eloise's visits to the house after Helene's death provide the film's only poignant moments.

[i]Summer Hours[/i] is about a family dealing with a problem most families can only dream of: how to best dispose of their mother's many pricey possessions. Having already snatched the only things I value from my own mother's house -- the few snapshots that prove that I was once a child -- I can sleep easy knowing that this is one situation I'm never going to have to deal with.