Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

The entrance hall of Chicago’s Fine Arts Building features the inscription “All Passes – Art Alone Endures.” Taken from a Henry Austin Dobson poem, the phrase is at the heart of Olivier Assayas’ tender, autumnal drama. When matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob) dies months after her 75th birthday, her three children face the following dilemma: whether to hang on to or relinquish their treasured family estate and its many valuable objets d’art. These items once belonged to Helene’s uncle, a famous painter with whom she had a close relationship decades before. Eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling) lives nearby in Paris and is reluctant to let go of them. However, his siblings Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) have relocated to New York and China, respectively. For them, they are artifacts from a past life and no longer retain any relevance.

Beginning and ending with two strikingly different parties at the estate, Assayas’ film is both suffused with glowing nostalgia for a dying era and a sobering sense of reality for a world in flux. Throughout, we see how seemingly simplistic objects exude a singular, unexplained currency, such as a silver tray for Adrienne, or a vase (unloved by Hélène) for longtime family maid Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan). The second film to be commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay (after Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON), SUMMER HOURS delicately considers how art endures, whether it’s guarded as an heirloom or ultimately commissioned as a museum piece.

- Chris Krioske