After the globe-spanning settings of his last three films, Olivier Assayas returns home for the mournful Summer Hours, examining a bourgeois French family trying to negotiate the past, present, and future. Assembled for the birthday of their widowed mother, Hélène, three siblings—Frédéric, Adrienne, and Jérémie—celebrate what will be their last family gathering at their once-beloved, magic ancestral home in the Île-de-France. Hélène dies, off-screen, a few months after this reunion, leaving her children to struggle with the best way to honor the past. Frédéric, the eldest, and the one who agonizes the most over the questions of legacy and heritage, finally agrees with his siblings to put the house on the market and sell their mother’s impressive art collection to the Musée d’Orsay. Assayas’s sincere, complex concern about cultural amnesia—the eroding of a nation’s heritage by the demands of the international economy—is rendered so deftly that the theme becomes one of larger, less classspecific importance. Summer Hours is also an impeccably observed family study, unimaginable without the remarkable ensemble of actors. Cinematographer Eric Gautier beautifully captures, in the two scenes that bookend Summer Hours, the very look and feel of what the film’s title evokes: sun-dappled, pastoral scenes of indolence and pleasure.