Summer Hours
L'heure d'été
Synopsis
When elderly matriarch Hélène discovers that her health is declining, she contacts her three children about contending with her art collection after her death. As the family gathers they must decide what to do with the inherited country estate and objects, while they also grapple with her mortality.
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Awards & Festivals
Village Voice Film Poll
2009 | 2nd place: Best Film
2009 | Nominee: Best Supporting Actress
Indiewire Critics' Poll
2009 | Winner: Best Film
2009 | 3rd place: Best Director
The venerable family house, inhabited by the delicately worried, aging matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob), and the fragility and ultimate impermanence of family ties act as opposing, yet oddly complimentary, forces in this deeply personal and quietly devastating film, which I doubt Olivier could have made before his own mother’s passing in 2007.
Kent Jones
April 20, 2010
Through the sheer grace of his mise en scène, Assayas gives us the point of view of this soon-to-be deserted place: it’s a perspective of very sweet indifference, a sadness tinged with fatalism.
Frédéric Bonnaud
March 01, 2009
Stop Smiling
With the help of cinematographer Eric Gautier, Assayas moves through space and time with a fluidity that at first feels light but grows heavier from accumulated detail and from the heightened, tragic sense that what we see before us is changing, and indeed may be gone before we understand it to be worth saving, loving, or remembering.
Eric Hynes
October 23, 2008
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