Critics reviews

Even the most gilded heirloom is not without thorns, and it is in the fray of exchange—material, familial, and generational—that Assayas locates a sense of vitality.

Olivier Assayas' L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours, 2008) is the work of an artist at the height of his powers. It is the culmination of nearly 40 years of reflection and research into the value of art and artistic practice. This value, for Assayas, originates in the artist's disposition towards the artwork and world, which is to say in the relationship the artist establishes, through his chosen artistic medium, between self and world.

The venerable family house, inhabited by the delicately worried, aging matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob), and the fragility and ultimate impermanence of family ties act as opposing, yet oddly complimentary, forces in this deeply personal and quietly devastating film, which I doubt Olivier could have made before his own mother’s passing in 2007.

Intense yet airy, Summer Hours eulogizes what’s been lost while looking, with cautious hope, at what lies ahead.

The brilliance of this film lies in its attention to tiny details (the teenager who gets nailed for smoking dope is also a guardian angel to her younger cousins) and in its determination to allow each emotion just the right amount of space.

As dramatically uneventful as these passages are, there's a kind of beautiful truth in them, too.

Don’t be fooled by the apparent modesty of its ambitions. Sometimes a small, homely object — a teapot, a writing desk, a sketchbook, a movie about such things — turns out to be a masterpiece.

Assayas captures the essence of what it means to keep history alive inside us: What matters more than the vase itself is the life you put inside it.

The film is dotted with thoughtful dialogue about what gives objects—and people—their meaning, and whether the things we once loved hold the same significance once they’re stuck behind glass, in a museum or a photo frame.

For André Téchiné and Patrice Chéreau, who have specialized in probing/expansive family melodramas, Summer Hours would be a trifle. For Olivier Assayas, it’s almost a masterpiece. Away from the awful chic nihilism of Demonlover, Clean and Boarding Gate, this post–New Wave auteur embraces his true Tradition of Quality heritage. Summer Hours could be a sequel to Assayas’ best film, Les Destinées Sentimentale.

Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent’s death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It’s also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value—as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.

...At this moment, Mr. Assayas comes close to replicating a similar feeling of helpless nostalgia in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. As it is, the writer-director of some of the most sharp-edged critiques of modern mores in the French cinema has softened his approach, except as regards his dour view of museums as dark places that embalm art objects instead of enhancing them.