Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Clevercell Very disappointing...

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

SnoopyStyle Hélène is the matriarch of an extended scattered family. She lives in the country outside of Paris where she has kept valuable art from a famous artist uncle. She has two sons and a daughter. The family gathers for her 75th birthday but at the end of the day, everybody leaves. The family has worked to keep the artist's legacy including a new art book and a world tour where Hélène does talks. Later, she passes and the family has to deal with the inheritance. The eldest Frédéric Marly wants to preserve the home. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is a famous designer in NYC. Jérémie is in China as a supervisor in a shoe company. They have to come to terms with the lost of their treasured memories.It's French. It's talky. It's sincerely adult. It's family. When the siblings are all in one place, there is a feeling of a real family talking in a real way. The movie can drift from scene to scene. There is one standout among the third generation. She closes the movie in a profound scene. It's a family film in the truest sense.

museumofdave This sumptuously photographed, leisurely film about different kinds of family legacy is intelligent and thought-provoking. The film deals with several generations and their attitudes towards the the nature of art, of business and of life itself; in its own way it asks several age-old questions--What does our life mean? At our death, what do we leave behind? How does our idea of culture continue when globalization undermines a sense of local tradition? Loaded with convincing performers, taking its time to examine siblings in conflict, and humane in approach, this is the kind of film that sadly seldom is made in our own country--this week, folks are flocking to The Avengers, a film essentially made for fifteen year old boys who like to see epic versions of violent video games--any other week it's much the same; I suppose these films fill the corporate coffers, but they offer any real insight into our lives? I think Summer Hours does just that.

Mike B This film has some things going for. The "summer home" which is the centrepiece of this film is lovely indeed. The story surrounds three siblings whose mother dies and they must deal with both the "summer home" and its contents. It's all done very humanly and without the buffoonery found in most "Hollywood films". The pace is slow and no big secrets are revealed. I got the feeling that if you haven't gone through the process of a parent dying and selling off the ancestral home this film would be far less appealing. I've gone through this whole ordeal and felt the film did capture the essence of it. But at times it was kind of like an "Antique Road Show" and my attention was starting to wander. Also the ending was somewhat trivial.

tieman64 "Summer Hours" begins, appropriately, with hordes of children running joyfully through a garden. They're on a treasure hunt, following a map written in invisible ink.Director Olivier Assays then introduces us to Helene Berthier, an elderly woman whose children and grandchildren have gathered at her home in rural France. Helene was once romantically linked to a character called Paul, a now dead artist who was renowned for his paintings.Helene's home is filled with both Paul's work (a vast collection of priceless art) and more mundane personal items which nevertheless have tremendous sentimental value. One photograph, for example, features an older generation of Berthiers sitting at a table exactly as the current generation are. As the film unfolds, Assayas lays the groundwork for various heavy themes: the way what we "treasure" changes as we age, how art and objects tie people to the past, the relationship between art, globalisation and commerce, the seemingly arbitrary and shifting "value" of objects, the question of what defines art and what makes art meaningful, how spaces are "deterritorialized" and "reterritorialized" under capitalism, how objects transform as they move from space to space etc etc. You might say this is the "rural" version of Assayas's "Demonlover", "Clean" and "Boarding Gate", but whilst those films focused on the way humans are stripped, sold, traded and pushed around under techno-capitalism, "Summer Hours" focuses almost entirely on man's fluctuating relationship with both inanimate objects and product.Early in the film, Helene reveals the reason for calling a family assembly: she wants to discuss the fate of the family estate after her death. Frederic, Helene's eldest son, is an economist, and is the only family member who wishes (for sentimental reasons) to hold on to the estate and its artwork. Daughter Adrienne (a product designer) and younger son Jeremie (who works for a mega corporation in Shaghai) both want to sell the estate. It's of no value to them, they won't be able to visit it as they work far abroad, and it simply isn't economical to maintain. Frederic doesn't agree with them at first, but gradually the practical needs of commerce infringe on his desire to hold on to the past. Reluctantly he agrees with them. Significantly, Adrienne, the product of a system which destroys the past and sells nostalgic copies, makes tacky ceramic ornaments based on the designs of her uncle. Assayas stresses that the children are all ultra-modern bourgeois, part of a "new France" that is beholden to the demands of the global market and that is gradually losing ties with its traditions and heritage. Casual remarks highlight this theme: characters speaking of new companies popping up in their village, once taboo romantic relationships accepted as the norm, the fact that Adrienne lives in two of the citadels of Global Capitalism (New York and Japan), the fact that Jeremie is moving his family to China to better manage a mass production shoe factory and the mention that Jeremie's children will learn English and not speak French (thereby cutting them off from their cultural roots). Ironically, it's the one economist in the family who can't cope with the way his family, culture and historical treasure trove are being torn apart. Frederic frequently states that he believes the "economy as a functional system" is a myth. He recognises that economism is the new global religion, in which the world is reordered in the service of irrational and incessant growth. The dominant theology of this religion is neo-liberalism, which aims to make the whole world a single market, national boundaries no longer a factor in economic affairs. Unlike most religions, economism looks to growth for salvation, salvation being "freedom" from poverty and the ills that accompany it. When it is pointed out that the "new religion" has not in fact done much toward reducing poverty, believers are told that they must be more faithful to the precepts of the religion. Of course while the believers wait, the machine's greed outgrows the capacity of the real economy to satisfy. In response, the great centres of finance get the governments of the world to make available to them, by privatisation, all of their possessions. But still this does not suffice! How could it? Debt based Ponzi schemes cannot be satiated. And so the market becomes increasingly abstract, debts ignored or traded as "value" whilst virtual economies balloon to something like five times the size of the "real" economy. The end result is the world Assayas' characters find themselves in: groundless and always moving to keep the whole sham from collapsing.In one scene, Frederic proudly displays paintings for his children, telling them that one day the collection will be all theirs. But though his kids look up at the artwork with indifference, implying that they are "cut off" from the "treasures of the past", Assayas is careful to show that Frederic is himself deluded, unable to look upon the pictures without bias. His pleasure is clearly less about the aesthetic qualities of art/past, than it is about family legacy, memory and the continuation of a family history. His children, able to look at the paintings without bias, simply dismiss them as old-fashioned. The result is that the film manages to mourns the obliteration/repackaging of the past whilst also questioning if anything is really being lost. Does the worth of an object reside only in the historical and familial remembrances of concerned individuals?The film ends with a sequence which mirrors its first shot. Here Helene's granddaughter looks on at the abandoned family home, trying but failing to position her body such that it recreates a "painting of the place" that Paul once did. It's a deeply sad ending; no longer connected by shared place or possessions, the modern subject is both adrift and defined by loss. 8.9/10 – A great film, though perhaps too word oriented.