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.

Helene, the matriarch of a well to do French family, living in a rural setting, is celebrating her 75th birthday. Her three children, Frederic, Jeremie, and Adrienne have come to have lunch with her. The two sons are married, but their sister is not married, although she is seeing someone. Only Frederic still lives in France. Jeremie is an executive now working in China. Adrienne is a designer that has made New York her home.

After lunch, Helene summons Frederic to her office to discuss what she wants to do with her possessions once she is dead. She has amassed a large collection of paintings and objet d'art, scattered all over the rambling house. Frederic is disturbed by what he his mother wants him to do, but since he is the only close by, he must be in charge. One thing Helene knows is the value of each piece in her valuable collection. Frederic has wanted to keep the paintings, especially the two Corot landscapes as part of their heritage. Most of the work was collected by an uncle who favored Helene and whose relationship with her is not completely explained, although one suspects there was some kind of incestuous liaison between them.

Unfortunately Helene dies a year after we first met her, leaving the siblings in a quandary. Adrienne is the practical one; she knows the tax bite will be enormous and the way about it is to donate the art work to the Musee D'Orsay, interested in most of the furniture and the rest. The older housekeeper Eloise is offered to take something from the house as a souvenir for herself to remember the family and ends up taking a valuable glass sculpture because she always thought it was so ugly that no one would like it.

"L'heure d'ete" is a fine movie written and directed by Oliver Assayas. There is a lot of symbolism in the way the story is presented. One can draw several conclusions about how the estate is being divided since Frederic, one feels, is the only one that shows any appreciation to the significance of letting go of the things he grew admiring and thought they would stay with the family forever, only to see it go to museums in order to avoid inheritance taxes. Mr. Assayas is taking a hard view at the two siblings that have fled the coop and have no interest in keeping what Frederic thought was rightly theirs.

This is a French film and the main idea is that in spite of what the three brothers think about the way to solve their problem, they still are civil and talk in a mature tone to one another. We liked Charles Berling as Frederic. He feels a quiet rage at losing control of the inevitable and to the things he loved. The Adrienne of Juliette Binoche is perfect in her take of this woman who has left everything behind to make a new life. Jeremie Renier, who can be seen in the current "Le silence de Lorna", and who has worked with the Dardenne brothers, in his native Belgium, was a surprise; he even looks different as the executive living so far away. We also enjoy Edith Scob's quiet intensity as Helene. Behind her serene exterior, there is nothing but a steel resolve to have things done according to her will.

Eric Gautier's cinematography does wonders for the enjoyment of the film. This is one of Oliver Assayas' most heartfelt movies. The director knew his characters well and it translates into a film that was a joy to sit through.

Olivier Assayas' film Summer Hours is very French and very much without any real 'hardcore' melodrama. That is to say we do not get scenes where a family yells at each other in grief or anything like that. This is more steeped in realism, so all the drama is based on little things, the details: what happens to the objects that have been in possession of the family house for years and years after the matriarch dies? What are the objects worth, or can they be sold or given away, or kept within the family? Or should the house even be sold at all? It's these little things, that are actually quite large and looming in the consciousness of a family that has just lost their mother/grandmother, and makes up the bare minimum of dramatic conflict in the film.

It's basically about three siblings, one lives in France, another in New York, and another in China. They barely can get altogether to see their 75 year old mother, who was once a very prominent artist and coming from a genius painter. The mother dies (this is not a spoiler since, frankly, it has to mentioned),and then the kids have to decide what to do next with her estate. This is stuff that usually one wouldn't think could make for compelling stuff, and indeed if there is a weakness it may be that his film is a bit, how to say simplistic: talky. Yes, it's a lot like a play (one critic compared it to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which I could see in the sense of it being about quibbling among siblings),but only so often do we see some real artistry on the part of Assayas. He's too busy giving us real life, which is only as occasionally really interesting as he thinks it is all the time (indeed we even get some limited familial drama with the Parisian father and his rambunctious teenage daughter who gets arrested).

Oh sure, if you love French cinema, and Juliette Binoche, it's worth your time... actually, Binoche is only in it for a third of the running time, but you shouldn't be expecting a big high-emotional drama, save for a few moments here and there. There's even a touching end, as a party takes place at the house and the teenage girl remarks simply "My grandmother is dead, her house is sold" and goes on her merry way. Little things like that stand out, but you have to watch for them, or they'll slip away. Like memories.