Olivier Assayas wrote and directed this film and it's a very good one.The film, in my opinion, directly addressed fading culture and the homogenizing of it. However the film is more about the loss of sentimental items due to necessity and economics. The Marly family is stuck together out of obligation and don't visit the matriarch like they should.The acting and the directing is more than solid. Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling play off each other well. The one who stuck out to me is Edith Scob. She played Helene beautifully. The audience felt her tiredness with life and her ultimate acceptance. She came across an amazing woman who had seen and done many things in her life. I recommend this to anyone who hasn't seen an Assayas or Binoche film.

A film about talented rich people squabbling, albeit very gently, about an inheritance would normally be a candidate to make my hackles rise. But 'Summer Hours' is a sensitive, subtle movie, that explores non-judgmentally what is important to us, and why: in short, how we define our emotional identities. The characters seem likable, but display an ordinary selfishness, and the film lightly samples the passions that make each of them tick. It's a very wordy movie, so much so, it could almost have been a stage play, but the director has a great sense of place, evoking his characters own feelings for place and the movie never feels heavy. In one sense, the ending is a touch underwhelming; but in keeping with the film's overall style. I liked it, a lot: the sort of film that only the French seem to make.

Three adult siblings must decide what to do with their mother's house and collection of valuable art after her death in this melancholy but quite lovely film from Olivier Assayas."Summer Hours" really struck a chord with me, because I've just recently begun to see the results of aging in my own parents and am beginning in a real rather than abstract way to prepare myself for a time when I will not have them in my life. The film does wonders at conveying this particular family dynamic with very few moments of outright exposition; the first scene especially, a family gathering while the mother is still alive and wants to inform her children about what to do with her things when she passes, is a marvel of subtle nuances in both the writing and acting that clearly communicates the differences in the relationships between the mother and her three children. The oldest brother doesn't want to think about his mother's death in advance and wants to hold on to things after she's gone; the two younger children, living in different parts of the world, want to be rid of things as quickly and cleanly as possible. Yet the movie doesn't pass judgement on any of them, doesn't treat the oldest brother as a sentimental fool, nor the younger siblings as callously indifferent. It simply acknowledges the complexity of emotions involved in dealing with inanimate objects that represent years of a flesh-and-blood relationship.Grade: A

Outside of the few film segments featuring the exuberance and playfulness of children and adolescents, the remainder of this film consists largely of half-baked characters and unsurprising dialog -- involving an upper-crust 'art society'-type family and their coveted material things (of inheritance). I was unable to get behind the (too predictable, ho-hum) characters, unoriginal story line, and tiring moving camera: I dropped out after about 45 minutes of careful viewing and then selectively fast-forwarded through the rest. This is one of those films which seems to have surfaced from a combination of ample production assets plus a lack of creative vision. Furthermore, many cinephiles like me are tired of encountering 'too familiar' actors in films; instead, we much prefer to be exposed to fresh, even unprofessional, talent. Major film directors Rossellini, Pasolini, and Bunuel, for example, were fully aware of the filmic (and economic) value of using unknown/lesser-known actors -- and they did so often to great effect. Binoche and Berling are fine actors, but as with Tom Hanks and Gwyneth Paltrow, hey, we're just plain tired of the lack of intrigue such overly recognizable (and therefore somewhat predictable) actors bring to the screen. On a related note, Alan Ball, the academy award-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, once said, "I can't write characters that have no flaws; they don't seem real." Summer Hours does eventually expose character flaws (or call it human nature), but the flaws are embodied by characters of a kind that discerning viewers may find difficult to believe, care about, or relate to. Not enough existential intrigue or human diversity here: too much stale white bread to chew on.