"Summer Hours" - REVIEW

It's hard to pigeonhole "Summer Hours", my first foreign language viewing of the year. It isn't exactly good, but I can't find the energy to rip it apart either. In some ways, it just....is. The premise can basically be summed up in one sentence: three siblings decide what to do with their mother's home and belonging's after her death. Not exactly room for lots of "dramatic moments", but as other such films have shown, this doesn't have to be a problem. Nothing overtly important 'happened' in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise", but that film succeeded on its revealing and engaging dialogue. And that's exactly what "Summer Hours" is missing. Most of the conversation is constrained to discussions of 'are we selling the house? do we donate this to the museum that was interested?' and there's never much revealed about the three siblings. The opening sequence (a family reunion) doesn't suffer from this because the selling process isn't even in the works, and it's the most commanding part of the film. But after this opener, it's all downhill into nothingness. Sure, Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is attached to a silver serving trey, and Frederic (Charles Berling) is the only one in defense of keeping the house, but it's never explored in any way. We learn next to nothing about these people in the past; only details about their current situations. All this does is inform us as to why two of the siblings want to sell the house, but we never get their feelings from the past. Not helping matters is the mystifying ending, which seems like a weak attempt to provide the 'aha!' moment that perhaps the house shouldn't have been sold. Are these people that detached from their childhoods? Or maybe they're secretly androids (I have to take issue with any movie that makes Juliette Binoche seem boring). That would certainly be a better explanation than anything that the movie offers us.

Grade: C