SUMMER HOURS World Cinema

Helene (Edith Scob) gathers her children and grandchildren at her French country estate to celebrate her 75th birthday Their gift of a tricky-to-use mobile phone, however, seems to symbolize the 21st-century pressures that are closing in on her precious way of life . The growing sense the exquisite Helene – the niece of a famous artist- has of her own mortality leads her to bequeath her most valuable artwork and furniture to her closest family her eldest son Frederic (Charles Berling), daughter Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and brother Jeremie (Jeremie Renier). Director Olivier Assayas’s gently beautiful meditation an connection and loss traces the journey of one family’s treasures from their home to their final resting place in glass cases, where they receive only the passing consideration of museum goers (like Hou Hsiaa-hs ien’s FLIGHT Or THE RED BALLOON [AFI FEST ’07], SUMMER HOURS was commissioned by the Musee d’Orsay to celebrate its 20 the anniversary). As he did in his LATE AUGUST , EARLY SEPTEMBER, Assayas uses elliptical jumps in time and unexpected shifts in perspective to tell an ensemble story in oblique, multilayered fashion. Gradually, carefully, Assayas shows how family ties, even in decent and affectionate families, inevitably erode aver time. The haunting late-afternoon melancholy is well served by Eric Gautier’s fluid camera and, combined with Assayas’s confident, inventive storytelling, makes SUMMER HOURS a bittersweet elegy about love and memory and the ways in which we hold them.