Summer Hours

Commissioned as part of a project for the Musée d'Orsay, Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours (2008) transcended its origins to become one of the most quietly beautiful films of its decade and a favourite of critics worldwide. A gentle meditation on art, family and the passage of time, it stands among the warmest works in the director's varied career.

Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier play the siblings dividing their late mother's estate, including the Orsay-worthy objets that have always furnished their childhood home. Assayas treats the dispersal of these heirlooms — destined for museum vitrines, auction houses or simply lost — as an elegy for a vanishing French bourgeois culture and for the way meaning leaks out of objects once removed from the lives that gave them value. The summer light and the family house become characters in themselves.

Critics praised its grace, its lightness of touch and its emotional depth, and it topped several best-of-year polls. Tender, intelligent and unexpectedly moving, Summer Hours turns a story about inheritance and real estate into a profound reflection on memory, globalisation and what we pass on. It is Assayas at his most humane — a small film that holds an entire world of feeling. Its lightness conceals real depth, and the film's meditation on what objects, houses and cultures we pass on has made it one of the most quietly beloved works of its decade among critics worldwide.