Summer Hours (2008)

A Major Disappointment

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

All of the reviews that I read raved about the great beauty of this film. I'm not sure which drugs they were on. By far, of all the French films I have ever seen, and I have seen many, this was the most tedious, uninviting piece of dullard dross I have ever seen.Firstly, the woman this entire pointless venture revolves around, does nil, nothing to endear us to her in the first 20 minutes or so of the film. She's a self-absorbed, ungrateful, miserable and unappealing 'aged' woman who decides that she'll wallow in her misery when there's no one around to keep her entertained. (A 'supposed' illicit love story, which may have put some spark into this crap never really revealed itself into more than a couple of sentences.) Yawn.So when the film moves on after her death, I had high hopes. Perhaps the thing was going to show some real character... perhaps the children she has left behind will actually show some personality, some vivacity, some drama, some individuality, ANYTHING!!!!!! Nope, dull, boring, sanitised people with dull, boring sanitised lives all meandering around sobbing over sticks of furniture and ugly art and furniture that appeals as much as cheap tinker market junk; visiting it in the museum after it saves them 'death taxes' and bemoaning the loss of 'their' house, now sold.To top this carnage of anything even remotely interesting off, the house sold, these same morons allow the grandchildren, now in their bored, abberant, dope-smoking teens, the most boring type of teens available to mankind, to have a 'last' party in a house which no longer belongs to them, so that their little rave party may leave some kind of parting message, possibly just hundreds and hundreds of discarded beer cans, condoms and rubbish for some poor new owner to clean up. Wow. And all with a parting shot of some of the worst overacting by a teen I would never remember as an actor in a million years.Biggest waste or money, time and my brain power in my life. Nothing here touched me in the slightest. The music was terrible, when they bothered, the characters so sanitised of anything that might make them personable that I am almost witless with boredom by this stage and the only thing which might have given this dross some interest, the beautiful exterior of the old house and gardens, we ended up seeing for about 10 seconds.Don't waste your time unless you have trouble sleeping.

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.

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.

This is quite the solemn experience, much like Antonioni's "L'Avventura". A family gathers around the grand-mère of the family in the country, the keeper of artwork by a great, late artist. She keeps telling her children what should go where once she's gone, too. The family image is special, and the direction is sublime in the extreme; where my Hollywood sense of watching films is painfully blown-up, I felt that this film told it like it should be, in a way; it took me on a journey. I could not help but feel that part of it was filled with symbolism and free will, real characters and a sense of laissez-faire. The direction is so very simple, yet I think it's sleight of hand; it's probably really hard work behind this. All in all: beautiful.