L'heure d'été

Unholy Alliances

The French writer-director Olivier Assayas has recently made nasty erotic thrillers ("Demonlover" and "Boarding Gate") about the impersonal brutality of global capitalism. But, in the new "Summer Hours," he is working in a calmer and more lyrical style. Reaching back to humanist masters like Renoir, he brings the global economy to bear on the fate of a bourgeois French family. A woman in her seventies (Edith Scob), the niece and possibly the lover of a deceased French painter, dies at her home outside Paris, and her three grown children, who were brought up there, have to decide what to do with the house, the Art Nouveau furniture, and the paintings, by Corot and other artists, that they lived with. [...]

di David Denby, articolo completo (1627 caratteri spazi inclusi) su The New Yorker 18 maggio 2009