Today, in many traditions, is the Feast of the Epiphany, the day the Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem to pay homage to the Christ Child. Bearing, as we all know, their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Myself, I’m not much for gold, and I loathe frankincense, and while I wouldn’t say no to myrrh—it smells a bit like vanilla—I’d rather have a novelty cookbook I don’t already own. Still, the other meaning of Epiphany is that it’s Movie Gift Unwrapping Day. The worst movie gift is better, in my opinion, than frankincense.

My own gift, given to me by Pico, is Summer Hours. I had been unfamiliar with it before receiving my gift, and I read just enough about it to determine that, yes, it sounded interesting. So I went into it basically blind.

I don’t want to own the house I grew up in. I don’t want to live in Los Angeles. The house meets very few of my needs, and it needs a ton of work. Or did, last time I saw it. But the last time I saw it, shortly before my mother sold it, I took nearly fifty pictures just of the house and yard, preserving every angle of importance to me, because I knew I would never set foot in it again. I left the house at age eighteen and was roughly twice that age as I walked through it. My mother was packing to sell, and there was a strange desolation to a house I knew better than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.

Hélène (Edith Scob) is celebrating her seventy-fifth birthday. She lives in a crumbling but still beautiful house about an hour train ride from Paris. She is the niece of a famous and influential painter, and the house is full of his art collection and her memories. She tries to talk to her oldest child, Frédéric (Charles Berling), about what should be done with things after her death, and he doesn’t want to talk about it, convinced as he is that she will live for many years to come. Only she doesn’t. And Frédéric may have emotional attachments to the house and collection, but his younger siblings Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) do not.

In a way, Frédéric reminds me of my Aunt Jane. When there was discussion about putting my grandmother into a nursing home, my aunt’s concern was the expense and what my grandmother would do in five years. Because my aunt was the only person who thought my grandmother would live five more years. She’d been the only one surprised when my grandfather died after his stroke. Frédéric cannot process that his siblings have lives that do not involve France, much less the house and belongings. He won’t listen to his mother as she tries to put things in order, surely something that should be done well before it’s needed.

I’m genuinely not sure how much I processed the movie on its own level; that said, I’m genuinely not sure how much processing it on its own level is being subsumed by thoughts of your own family and its history. There’s something of a subplot to do with Hélène and her late uncle, Paul Berthier, and what their relationship really was. Which is creepy and better ignored, frankly. And late in the movie, we spend time with Frédéric’s daughter, Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing), who initially felt nothing for the house and is preoccupied with her own life and interests and is running a bit wild, and I found her more sympathetic than her father.

I also wanted to know more from the perspective of Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan), who had been the housekeeper for many years. What was her relationship with the house and family really? Did she know the secrets of the house? Was she aware of the value of the present she took to remember Hélène by? What will she do now? What is her life now? What did she think of Hélène’s children? I’m much more interested in her life than in Frédéric’s despair that his mother’s desk is now somewhere it can be seen and admired by ordinary people instead of being covered in the detritus of his mother’s life. He thinks all these things belong in houses, because he’s never lived in a house that didn’t have that sort of thing in it. We were never going to discover that the vase we’d been putting wildflowers in for decades was secretly worth a fortune.

So how about all of you? How did your movie gifts turn out?