Summer Hours (L'Heure D'Été) Review

"Come on, let's find the treasure!" exclaim the children as they while away the summer hours playing an elaborate orienteering game in the vast garden of a country estate - little realising that there are altogether more real treasures to be found indoors. By the time Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours is over, viewers will be left to ponder whether the day-to-day living of a family, or the physical legacy it leaves behind, has the greater value.

The occasion for the treasure hunt is a family reunion at the home of matriarch Hélène (Scob) in celebration of her seventy-fifth birthday. Ever since the death of her beloved uncle Paul years before, Hélène has surrounded her life with his collected artworks and art deco furniture, and has dedicated her autumn years to preserving his memory in a book and occasional lectures. Now, with her own health beginning to decline and her three grown-up children with lives and families of their own, her thoughts are turning to what will happen to the house and its contents once she is gone.

Not long afterwards, Hélène has indeed passed away and her three heirs meet to discuss what their mother referred to as "the residue". The eldest, Paris-based economist Frédéric (Berling) wants the collection to remain intact as a legacy for the whole family. Jérémie (Renier) is now living in China and sees little point in maintaining a French country house and art collection from which he is unlikely to benefit, and to which he, like his long-dead father, never felt particularly attached in the first place.

Adrienne (Binoche), working from New York, agrees with Jérémie, even if as a designer she has drawn some inspiration from the family's artistic side. And so the collection is dispersed, the house put up for sale and Héléne's devoted housekeeper Éloïse (Sadoyan) gradually forgotten.