Summer Hours

Director Olivier Assayas goes to the heart of a bourgeois French family. Summer Hours opens with a gaggle of first cousins romping around the grounds of a rustic estate, north of Paris, where their parents grew up. The occasion is a 75th-birthday celebration for their grandmother, Hélène (Edith Scob). Assayas, who has always excelled at choreographing a fête, uses the first half-hour to introduce Hélène’s three grown children, as well as her devotion to the estate. For all the local color, there’s a global backbeat: The youngest child runs a factory in China; his sister (Juliette Binoche) is a New York designer; and the eldest son is an economist. Hélène dies, off-screen, perhaps a year later, and Summer Hours evokes a parent’s death and the dissolving bond among 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.