A mother dies. A family gathers to divide the estate and trade memories. Life and death, those persistent cliches, duke it out once more at a country house just outside Paris. From familiar material, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Boarding Gate) crafts a near perfect blend of humor and heartbreak, a lyrical masterwork that measures loss in terms practical and evanescent. The great Edith Scob is superb as the seventy-five-year-old widow who furnished the elegant mansion