Summer Hours Details

My wife watched it through ....

After half an hour of pretty pictures and 'what's it all about?' thoughts, I turned instead to Sudoku.

At the end, wife said 'what was that about?'.

Still, the photography was charming.

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Disappointing - lovely house but lousy plot

The film begins with a group of children playing in the grounds of a French country house. They are called into lunch, to be eaten al fresco. It is a rare gathering of this family, come to celebrate the 75th birthday of the mother of her three children, two sons and a daughter. The elder son is the only one to live in France - he is a professor of economics. His younger brother works in China, where he lives with his family. The daughter of the old lady lives in the USA.

The old lady owns a collection of valuables - three Corot paintings, a bureau and other pieces of furniture and three sketch books of a famous artist. One purpose of the gathering is to discuss the fate of this collection when the old lady dies.

The mother dies - off stage, as it were. The siblings gather and decide that the house must be sold off, so will the Corot paintings as the professor cannot afford to buy out the others. The furniture will be acquired by the state for the museum and the sketch books will be sent for auction at Christie's, New York where 'they will be dismembered and sold page by page'.

That, in essence, is about it. The professor's surly daughter has a spot of bother with the police over drugs and shop-lifing and the old house-keeper and cook at the house, picks a valuable vase as a keepsake offered by the professor - 'Choose what you like!' She boasts to her nephew that she only chose a worthless item. 'Quite right!' agrees the young man. The teenage children arrange a party in the house to say goodbye to it.

I cannot see what the vision behind this film was. The story line is hardly gripping, there is virtually no character development and there is little tension. The house - one of those very special French houses which we don't have - in its lovely grounds - induced in me a nostalgia which I have no rational excuse for getting. It was my favourite character.