By Laura Allsop

Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours, a film about the fictional Berthier family dealing with a burdensome inheritance including a treasure trove of 19th century art, premieres in the UK on Friday (when it opened in France earlier this year, Le Monde called it an 'admirable success'). Originally commissioned as a short for the twentieth birthday celebrations of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris (which features prominently, as do a selection of its Art Nouveau pieces kindly loaned for the film), Summer Hours is concerned with artifacts and where they belong. The museum's sponsorship fell through early on, but Assayas continued the film with the help of its star Juliette Binoche, and turned it into more nuanced feature. The result is a quiet and lyrical movie that poses a pertinent question in a time where philanthropists like Eli Broad are wresting power from museums: if you are fortunate enough to inherit art, what should you do with it?

In the film, three siblings – who inherit works by Degas, Redon and Josef Hoffmann among others – decide, after some soul searching, to sell their family home and its contents after the matriarch Hélène dies. But what to do with the art? There is talk of flogging their fictional painter uncle's work through Christie's, which would mean breaking up his ouevre and seeing works disappear abroad. Instead, a tax relief scheme prompts them to donate to the Musee d'Orsay, where the uncle's works are lovingly restored. Nevertheless, the eldest son Frédéric moans that the family's paintings are now 'incarcerated' in the museum. Theodor Adorno famously made an analogy between the museum and mausoleum, calling our institutions family sepulchres for works of art. While the gifts to the museum in Summer Hours come directly as the result of death, there is nothing sinister about the way they're eventually presented, as part of a permanent display of fin-de-siecle homeware. In fact, the moment a museum conservator manages to piece together the shattered remains of a Degas – smashed to bits by the inheritors when they were kids and hilariously kept for years in a plastic bag – is a joy to behold. Frédéric's grumbling is that of a man unable to let go of his past. But in the end, giving up the old family mansion and giving away the art lightens the psychic load of the past on the Berthiers and brings them happily together.


The Berthier family in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours (2008)

Assayas points out how we constantly fetishise the past, and how much of what we deem culturally important in Europe has little relevance to the present moment, something he celebrates especially in the film's final scenes. Still, it's better to conserve the past than obliterate it, which is why museums exist. And it is even better to donate art works to a museum than keep them moldering in a house; even Adorno might concede that such Fall of the House of Usher-esque homes are more mausoleum-like than any museum. In the end, the Berthier family makes the right decision and gives to the public what they hadn't earned.

While the culture of philanthropy in the US seems threatened by Eli Broad's decision to effectively disinherit LACMA of his contemporary collection (instead it will remain the property of his foundation), in Europe it is in fact becoming easier to donate works to public institutions rather than cling onto them in your own home or in a private vanity foundation. Museums in France have been reaping the benefits since 2003, when the government introduced tax incentives precisely to encourage such generosity, even among living collectors. The UK offers incentives but only on a deceased person's estate, meaning donations are fewer and further between. Sir Nicholas Serota of the Tate, perhaps tired of waiting for potential benefactors to die (as, after all, enormous donations like the one Antony D'Offay made recently only come once in a blue moon), recently made a plea in the Guardian for the government to allow tax breaks on donations made by existing collectors. If the government takes heed it would do wonders for museums and particularly for contemporary art, replenishing the stocks of our ever-expanding museums, and keeping them as relevant to the present moment as possible.