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Created Aug 01, 2009 05:50PM PST • Edited Jun 10, 2017 07:54AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   A finely observed familial drama about siblings dealing with the death of their mother and the disposition of their museum-like childhood home, Summer Hours disdains standard movie drama. It’s edgeless, a film for two mature cohorts: those who’ve gone through their own generational cycles and lovers of French cultural accouterments.

   Writer-director Olivier Assayas deftly doles out telling details, layer-painting a deep grained picture of a multigenerational extended family: their flaws, strengths, grace, narcisms, and seasons of life. Impressionistic, this detail build-up method seems deeply, favorably French.

   A warning about this talky movie’s subtitles: Speed read to keep up.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Terrific performances across the large cast. Edith Scob’s matriarch, slim and lovely at 75, anchors the movie from the outset, authentically conveying the hopes, weaknesses and strengths of a woman at the end of a lifetime of choices: daughter, then mother of privilege.

   Her direct heirs – played by Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier – display various frustrations of Me Generation children grown to adulthood. Their significant others – two wives and a boyfriend played by Dominique Reymond, Valérie Bonneton and Kyle Eastwood – are little more than appendages to the nuclear family at the movie’s center. (Too bad Eastwood’s character is kept at a distance. It would have been great to see Clint’s tall son with more screen time amongst this French cast.)

   Isabelle Sadoyan authentically co-anchors the movie as the redoubtable cook and housekeeper.

   Alice de Lencquesaing’s teen granddaughter brings spark and freshness to the proceedings. Let’s hope she finds work in Hollywood, not just in French cinema.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

7. Female Costars Perfect 5.0

   Isabelle Sadoyan & Alice de Lencquesaing

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    The film starts off liltingly, with opening credits that gracefully shatter once settled, a metaphor for the story to follow. What does follow is a tour de force of cinematic storytelling, especially given the narrow focus and lack of serious conflict. Some will find such familial drama boring, but for those of us who’ve seen more than a bit of life in our own families, the voyeuristic experience of peering into this one approaches the profound.

    Olivier Assayas recently told Salon that his film describes how “the familial bond is less precious, less necessary, to people nowadays. Maybe because we are very selfish. People’s connection to their family comes with its upside and downside, and we don’t want the downside. So because we are losing the connection to the family structure, we still need to have some kind of collective bond, and we try to re-create it.”

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Great 4.0

    The novelistic script includes many a pithy line, such as the classically-inclined mother saying to her au courant daughter: “You prefer objects not weighted down by the past.” Some daughters I’ve known coulda/woulda justified months of therapy to deal with a maternal judgment like that.

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0

    A cinematic postcard to French country living, Impressionism and early to mid 20th century design. The artist and designer name-drops alone are dizzying.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.1

    Edge? This movie’s edgeless, notwithstanding the foibles of a mildly wayward teen and her house-partying friends.

17. Sex Innocent 1.2

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Polite 1.0

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    Contemporary French movies are enlightening to American eyes since the stories are easily relatable to our own, yet appear as through a looking-glass given the pronounced linguistic and subtle cultural differences. An Affair of Love comes to mind as another French movie deeply intriguing to the American mind.

    That said, it’s hard to look at modern French people and not think: Theirs is a country that hasn’t effectively come to its own defense in over a century.

    On the positive side, the movie shows the native comfort that the French have with artistic refinement and joie de vivre. Bravo!

    Finally, the eldest brother loses a one-sided debate with a bombastic talk show host, notwithstanding his correct thesis about the hubris of economists who recommend frequently self-defeating economic control mechanisms. Dismal indeed.

    As to the bombastic talking head, the French are sadly not alone in being plagued by that scourge of the contemporary political landscape.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

    Paul Berthier, the great artist who bequeathed a legacy of cultural refinement to his fictional family, is himself apparently a fiction. That makes the movie 50% circumstantially Glib.

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0