Breaking up (an art collection) is hard to do: Summer Hours

I loved this movie, maybe more than it deserved, but why quibble? "Summer Hours" is a beautiful film, and not only because of La Binoche - the whole movie, the look, the acting, the very smart script, just loose and open enough to keep you thinking and guessing, but very nicely structured to bring you through the course of a year, summer to summer, in the life of one family. Story line is that the 75ish mother/grandmother has a charming, somewhat rundown country house where the family - two sibs living abroad and one in Paris - gather. The mother has a very valuable art collection, including unique notebooks from her uncle, a famous artist (and, as we learn, her lover). When she dies, the children have to decide how to break of the estate: one wants to keep it intact and hold onto the house for family gatherings. The two sibs living abroad want to sell - the only seldom come back to France, and they need the money. The great thing here is that all the characters are very likable and very credible, though each with his or her own foibles. None is perfect, none is predictable. They genuinely love one another, but it's a love with its own exasperations, like most familial love. Perhaps the most poignant character is the old Chekhovian servant who keeps the household going and retires to drab senior housing when the sibs sell. They give her a vase she loved, which they know is valuable, but she thinks she took something cheap, which in her view would be only right. Two great scenes at the end, as the oldest son and his wife visit the Musee d'Orsay to see their bequest on display, and the final scenes in which the grandchildren have a weekend blast at the country house, now stripped of its valuables - a new and different generation, culture. Finally, Marge and I were pleasantly shocked and astonished at how much the grandmother reminded us of Ruth and at the many similarities to this story and to our own family saga of inheriting, selling, dividing her art collection (which unfortunately did not include two Corots and museum-quality furniture).