Universally acclaimed by critics, the multiple award-winning Summer Hours is the great contemporary French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’s most personal film to date. Three siblings, played by Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, and Jérémie Rénier, must decide what to do with the country estate and objects they’ve inherited from their mother. From this simple story, Assayas creates an exquisitely nuanced drama about the material of globalized modern living. Naturalistic and unsentimental, Summer Hours is that rare film that pays respect to family by treating it with honesty. –The Criterion Collection
In the ’90s Olivier Assayas emerged as one of the key figures in the new generation of French filmmakers. As a former critic for Cahiers du Cinema and a die-hard cinephile, he makes his films both personal and referential to the works of directors that he adores. His father was a director/screenwriter in the 1940s who later worked mainly for TV. When it was increasingly difficult for him to work because of a health condition, Olivier started to help him, first merely as a secretary, and then ghostwriting a few screenplays for the Maigret TV series. In the late 1970s he joined the team of influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, that once launched the French New Wave. While working for Cahiers he wrote essays on his favorite European filmmakers, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and published extensive studies on American horror films and Hong Kong Cinema (the latter came out long before Hong Kong cinema became fashionable with Western filmgoers and critics). He collaborated… read more
"Summer Hours" is a movie about life just like life is. Such as we see in "L´eau froide", Olivier Assayas offer us great and naturalistic interpretations/characters placed in simple stories without almost any action. As realistic as it is possible. 3/5 stars
Great story about three siblings having to break up their mother's estate. I'm surprised that this topic has seldom been done before, even though we will all have to do it (and it will be done to our possessions after we go). If I was French, this film would be very worrying, since France and the mother's estate are things whose day has passed, and now the best bits should be put in a museum for tourists to gawp at.
City of Lights, City of Angels, Los Angeles' festival of new French films, is on through the weekend and Anna Karina will be there on
Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Plus: Launched on Monday and running for a while, The Notebook's 2nd Annual Writers Poll. Part 2's up, too
David Phelps has provided a more than ample introduction to Olivier Assayas' new film, Summer Hours, which can be found here at The Auteurs
Like the prose of Virginia Woolf, the films of Olivier Assayas seem built out of one-thing-and-then-another, a fluid staging of long pans and
In the natural continuation of his “Les Destinées sentimentales”, Assayas returns from the corporate aspect of the modern world to that basic unit of society, the family. And the result is a quietly… read review
I’ve noticed Assayas’ style leans towards the cold and detached yet in no other way could I imagine this great story about the dismantling of a home, a symbol for our familial traces, after the loss… read review
What is the true value of something? Whether it a house, paintings, heirlooms, or photos, do objects hold more worth monetarily or sentimentally? Just the fact that the deceased is taxed upon death… read review