Recalling Marcel Pagnol’s humanist charmer The Baker’s Wife (1938) with its sly town-and-country comparisons, this is a film that delights in rejuvenating clichés. Scowling at everyone when he’s not feuding with brother Stéphan Guérin-Tillié, Nicolas Cazalé makes an archetypal prodigal after he returns home to run father Daniel Duval’s mobile shop.
But director Eric Guirado resists wholly reforming Cazalé, and although the beauty of Laurent Brunet’s cinematography will mislead some into dismissing it as blandly feelgood, this considered comedy has much to say about the dynamics of family life, the incertitude of the rural idyll and tradition’s place in a globalised society.