Director: Olivier Assayas
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 3.5
When a family matriarch (Edith Scob) passes on, her offspring (which include Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling) have to figure out what to do with a massive collection of art she accumulated over a lifetime, including the notebooks and works of their late uncle, a famous artist. It is a relaxed (yet slightly stodgy) and somber (though optimistic) peek at what remains of us and our belongings and our memories when we finally perish, especially now in the age of disposable objects and rapidly updated technology (an unboxed, unused cell phone sits on a windowsill, collecting dust). Assayas offers more questions than answers - is it better for objects to be passed on from generation to generation or are they better served in a museum? should those art objects (like the vase) be used in practical ways (as a thing that holds flowers and water) or merely exist as objects-in-themselves? - although he wraps up the movie on a beautifully poetic note (making visual reference to a teen party in his earlier film Cold Water), arguing that perhaps the most important artifact to remain after we are die is the memory of us in the minds of those that knew us and either loved or hated us. As Robyn Hitchcock sang in his ode to Nick Drake, when you're gone you take your whole world with you.
