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We love movies and museums, and while making notes for a meeting at the Ayala Museum we fell to thinking of movie scenes set in museums. There must be thousands, from those Night at the Museum movies to the meeting between 007 and Q in Skyfall. (A friend of ours tried to shoot some scenes for a forthcoming movie at the National Museum but his request was rejected.)

1. Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas

We saw this for the first time last month. It’s gorgeous. When a well-known art scholar dies, her three children must decide what to do with her substantial art collection and her house outside Paris. They can’t keep the art because the inheritance taxes would wipe them out, and keeping the house is no longer practical when two of them live on other continents. In many Tagalog movies, dead parents and inheritance issues are the trigger for hysterical confrontation scenes and high-decibel raking-up of the past. In Summer Hours everyone is so civilized and articulate, so…French?

Summer Hours is an engaging treatise on art, time, life and death, globalization, and objects—what they represent, our attachment to them, how they mean different things in different contexts. An absolute must-watch.

2. Lovers on the Bridge by Leos Carax

Wrenchingly romantic and beautifully weird: a street performer (Denis Lavant) and a woman who’s going blind (Juliette Binoche) meet and fall in love on the Pont Neuf. It’s not easy. In one scene he sneaks her into the Louvre after closing time so she can look at the paintings one last time before she loses her eyesight.

3. Band of Outsiders by Jean-Luc Godard

Apart from containing one of our favorite dance numbers, Bande a Part (Quentin Tarantino borrowed the name for his production company and the dance scene for Pulp Fiction) has that scene in which the three friends try to set a record for racing across the Louvre. Thirty-nine years later, Bertolucci paid homage to that scene (and to the New Wave in French cinema) in The Dreamers.

And here’s that dance scene.

TO BE CONTINUED