Dividing an inheritance are Jérémie Renier as Jérémie, Juliette Binoche as Adrienne and Charles Berling as Frédéric in Summer Hours.

IFC Films

It may have a breezy, carefree title, but director Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours is actually a rumination on what happens to a family after a loved one’s death and the stuff that’s left behind.

Assayas has delivered a very realistic view of what occurs after a family’s matriarch has passed away, leaving them with a lot of choices and responsibilities they had tried to avoid facing for the past several years, not to mention a big country house filled with things that are both tangible — valuable art works — and intangible — memories. The objects had once been important to Hélène Marly (Edith Scob) who we see at the start of the film celebrating her 75th birthday with a family reunion. The occasion has brought sons Frédéric (Charles Berling) from Paris and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) from China with their families and daughter Adrienne (a blonde and nearly unrecognizable Juliette Binoche) from New York.

In the midst of the festivities, Hélène catches Frédéric’s ear to lay out her plans for the disposition of the house and its objects after she is gone. Nothing in it matters as much to her as a group of notebooks filled with sketches made by her uncle Paul Berthier, a notable painter who died 30 years earlier and whose career has just been feted with a new U.S. edition of a book about his works. There also will be an American cross-country gallery exhibition tour of his paintings.

Hélène lays out her plans very concisely and assuredly with Frédéric and yet there’s a touch of sadness here as well. She is alone, her family having decamped for the four corners of the globe.

There’s a sad and wistful tone to Assayas’ film as well. For soon Hélène has died and some of her very carefully laid out plans — never put into a will — are thrown into disarray as her children decide what is best for them in their present circumstances.

Summer Hours is not one of those films where there’s a lot of bickering and backstabbing among the family. The Marlys are a group of well-educated, intellectuals — Frédéric is an economist who has just published a book that debunks economics; Adrienne designs high-end crockery for a Japanese department store; Jérémie watches over his company’s athletic shoe factories in China. So they sort out their differences about what’s to be done with Hélène’s estate in a most civilized manner … maybe a little too civilized.

Although Summer Hours is realistic and has a terrific ensemble cast, there’s nothing terribly earthshaking that goes on in it. Assayas may have sensed this because near the end of the film, out of nowhere, he throws in a crisis for Frédéric to overcome. It involves his teenage daughter who previously was a minor character indistinguishable from the other children in the film.

Nevertheless, there are heartfelt moments and a grasp of finality presented beautifully and touchingly in scenes where Hélène’s children gather at her house with a group of appraisers and museum curators to pore over the contents of the place, looking in every drawer and cupboard like police detectives, to break up Hélène’s collection of treasures. Here there’s a touch of spiciness as rumors surface of the special relationship shared between Hélène and her uncle, a very real presence in the film although he has been long dead. It’s a bit of titillating gossip, but it no longer seems to matter much in the overall scheme of things, just like what happens to Hélène’s collection.

A scene involving a priceless vase that Frédéric gives away to Hélène’s longtime cook primes us for some later confrontation over ownership of the piece. But surprisingly nothing arises from this and the sticky matter is later resolved off screen. We never know how that came to be. It’s as though a piece of the puzzle had been left on the cutting room floor. Just as well, perhaps. Life is, after all, a lot of unfinished business … and one where someone’s treasure is someone else’s trash.

***1/2Summer Hours

Starring: Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jérémie Renier, Edith Scob. In French with English subtitles.

Rated: Not rated, contains drugs, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com