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Critics Consensus: Olivier Assayas' contemplative family drama handles lofty ideas about art and culture with elegance and lightness.
Critic Consensus: Olivier Assayas' contemplative family drama handles lofty ideas about art and culture with elegance and lightness.
View All L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours) News
All Critics (106) | Top Critics (34) | Fresh (99) | Rotten (7) | DVD (4)
Assayas' script is more allusive than demonstrative, with a distinct whiff of Eric Rohmer in its conversational blocks separated by fadeouts.
n Summer Hours, Olivier Assayas's gently provocative rumination on family and possessions, a trio of siblings wrestles with the problem of what to do with the old homestead once Mother is gone.
Evocative look at a family trying to decide what to do with its treasures.
Where a Hollywood film of a family feuding over a fabulous estate would surely end with a slapped face and an infantry charge of lawyers, Assayas's work concludes with a smile and a shrug. Life goes on. What else can it do?
Performances in this small and profoundly eloquent film are superb, yet none redirects attention from Assayas's earnest meditation on the ravaging effects of a shrinking world on family traditions and entrenched personal relationships.
This is a movie that, for all its once-over-lightliness, stays with one. Given what it's about, and the intelligence of its makers, how could it not?
I love films which capture that atmosphere of late summer, lazy and sultry and shadowed by the coming autumn. So I found this very moving.
In crafting his own objet d'art, Assayas has paid careful consideration to the fine aesthetic practiced in Taiwan, particularly that of Hou Hsiao-hsie.
Avoiding easy conflict and histrionics, Summer Hours instead shows loving siblings, relatives and friends negotiating differences the best that they can.
Olivier Assayas's new meditation on French domestic life, the wisely ironic Summer Hours, begins with children's games and ends with adolescent partying and pairing off -- that is, the real business of life
( ... ) Summer Hours is Assayas's best film set on home turf-the one that best puts things in perspective and loudly proclaims that one must know how to shed dead skin to go on living.
Has the feel, if not the look, of an old man's film, a meditation on the passing of time.
"Summer Hours" is a movie about life just like life is. Such as we see in "L´eau froide", Olivier Assayas offer us great and naturalistic interpretations/characters placed in simple stories without almost any action. As realistic as it is possible.
Super Reviewer
"Summer Hours" from Olivier Assayas is a completely absorbing and poignant character piece; one of the finest and most authentic films about the family dynamic and the unexpected twists and turns our lives take I've ever seen. Assayas crafts an extremely intimate film here. Whereas a lesser filmmaker would have audiences feeling as if they were intruding on matters so personal, he invites us into his narrative and makes us a part of his characters lives. It's lush, warm, and soothing visuals and tone ensure that we've enjoyed our stay. A remarkable and heartwarming triumph.
A kindly matriarch leaves her palatial country estate to her three grown children who, after her death, debate whether or not to sell and what is lost if they do. The concept for the film is strong, and by and large, the performances are subtle, nuanced, and strong. However, the film is simply too slow. At about the beginning of the second act, we've already figured out the film's theme and have a very good idea about how it's going to end, and for the last hour, we're waiting for the film to catch up to its audience.
A typical French film: heavy on feelings, and relationships, with no seeming action or purpose. Well done, good insight into people trying to lead a good life, showing life takes control of us and goes on in spite of ourselves. But unbearably slow...ZZZzzzzzzzzzz.
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