Summer Hours

It was another fairly quiet day at work today. The weather outside was mostly really nice, but there were a few rain showers.

After work I headed up to the Cineworld cinema for the first of my Film Festival films. This one was a French film called Summer Hours, directed by Olivier Assayas. Basically when the elderly head of a wealthy family dies, her children have to decide what to do with her large country house and priceless art collection. Her eldest son, an economist, wants to keep the house as a summer house and preserve the art works for sentimental value. The youngest son, an executive in a shoe company who is about to move to China with his wife and kids, wants to sell it all because he needs the money and would probably never want to to go back to the house. The daughter, a designer living in the USA, also wants to sell. However as the art works are packed away to be shipped out the family have to confront their memories, both good and bad, and various family secrets are revealed. As probably befits a movie partially financed by a museum (in this case the Musee d'Orsay in Paris) the movie moves at a slow, sedate pace and there are plenty of long lingering shots of paintings and antique furniture. Not much really happens in the film. The primary themes are heritage, memory, nostalgia and the value of objects. It's actually quite a relaxing film in many ways because it's so quiet and slow. It has a good cast as well, headed by Juliette Binoche as the designer daughter.

Unfortunately the traffic was so bad that, despite leaving almost an hour before show time I still missed the opening minutes of the film, although I think I must have only missed the opening credits, I was still very annoyed. It does feel slightly weird being at the Film Festival in June because it's usually in August. It was changed because it was felt that the Film Festival was being overshadowed by all the other Festivals happening in Edinburgh in August. Speaking of which, booking for the Book Festival opens tomorrow. I'm taking the day off work as well, so that should be good.