This French film begins with a 75th birthday party and ends with a teenage girl taking some tentative steps into adulthood. In between, the relentless cycle of life is explored through the prism of three generations of the same family.

The elegant Hélène (Edith Scob) is the matriarch of a family scattered to the four winds and who now lives in the rural family home with just her long-suffering housekeeper (Isabelle Sadoyan) for company. She is devoted to preserving and promoting the name of her uncle, an artist of modest repute. Moreover, the house appears to be bulging with various antiques of value.

Her death, though, brings certain unspoken tensions to a head between her three children, two of whom now live abroad. The oldest, an academic (Charles Berling), wants to preserve the family home and the works within it.The others have lost touch with those days and have practical financial matters to address. Accordingly, decisions over the inheritance need to get made.

Now I agree that this does sound like a rather galling discussion to have to listen in on. However, there is a certain voyeuristic realisation on your part that this is a discussion that most siblings sadly have to have sooner or later. Therefore, in true soap opera style, you do want to know how it works out between them.

At the same time, the film fortunately does extend beyond that in terms of its ambition! It also portrays a keen sense of life being for the living. Hélène is insistent that her interests in preserving the past die with her. Frédéric, mostly out of a sense of filial duty, is inclined to disagree. However, his own life is complicated by raising children of his own, as well as other challenges that are to befall him. In this sense, Frédéric is representative of middle age – having to accept that not everything in life can be as he wants it to be, but learning to accept the pleasures that his life does offer him.

Finally, there is Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing), the daughter of Frédéric. The early scenes show her frolicking with the other children. Later on, she has a run-in with the law. However, when she brings all of her friends to the old house for a party, the sense is clearly that she is now less of a child and now more of a woman. Once more, so, time has had its effect. and the cycle continues.

This film was brought about with the support of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Inevitably, this makes it another film with a sense of product placement to it, given that it overtly promotes the idea that there are inheritance tax benefits from turning over valuable antiques to the French State. At the same time, there is an interesting debate throughout the film regarding aesthetics versus utility. This leads to several nicely worked tongue-in-cheek moments. There is also the rather sad transition of a fine-looking desk from being a busy place of work to being just some more pieces of adjoined wood sitting there all polished and shiny in a museum for visitors to breeze nonchalantly past.

On the whole, Summer Hours is a little ponderous and erratic as a work. Equally, it is somewhat devoid of drama. However, it does engage in the subjects of death and the continuity of life in a manner that both avoids over-sentimentality and provokes some worthy thought on the subject. Above all, though, it paints a picture of family life from a variety of perspectives. Even if this can feel a little cobbled together at times, it does capture that sense of different and assertive points of view having to figure out ways of all getting along together. In the end, familial love wins out over property and objects.

This is a film that is unlikely change your life, but which possesses a simple and touching beauty that should enrich it a little.