Summer Hours

SUMMER HOURS is a great film: encompassing many different aspects of people and life within wonderfully directed scenes of naturalism and honesty. I've not seen a film with greater honesty about teenagers, or greater honesty about families. In SUMMER HOURS, three siblings gather around the impending death of their mother. Their father was never around, and so she is their beacon, their matriarch. The first quarter or so of the film depicts the family joking and happy around the matriarch in her home: a gorgeous, lurid house filled to the brim with un-calculatable art and culture. It's the 21st century, and the siblings move about each other in defensive mechanisms, each going to see the mother at different points and manipulating her for some sort of material item. What SUMMER HOURS gets right is this: the time that passes between seeing people when you're disconnected, the sibling battle between desires for parental attention and a common bond against those parents descent or ascent, and the teenagers obliviousness to it all expect on base levels of: dad's being a dick. As Olivier Assayas films SUMMER HOURS, as he directs his actors, the film grows to a greater level of greatness. The acting is perfect, people talk over each other, whisper, blink, like a symphony of images and reactions to each other. And then in the second half, Assayas makes SUMMER HOURS even more modern and relevant. For, Assayas is a director who concerns himself with money. Money. Money, how it works, how it's complicated, how it divides the family, how sensibilities and greater truths transcend that desire for money, and then reality crashes into them in the form of closer family. A great film.
Summer Hours: ★★★★