Ill-Informed Gadfly

(Seen at the 16th annual VCU French Film Festival at the Byrd Theatre in Richmond, Va.)

A successful if soulless Parisian painter relocates to his country house and rediscovers life’s simple pleasures, thanks to the homespun wisdom of his gardener. What a cliché! Except director-screenwriter Jean Becker carries it off with heart and grit. “Dialogue avec mon jardiner,” starring a well-matched Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darroussin, was the best of the four movies I saw at the VCU French Film Festival. It’s lively and funny and warm, and Becker — son of the late director Jacques Becker, famous for “Touchez pas au grisbi” among other movies — directs with understated confidence. The movie has very little conflict — the painter and the gardener (they refer to each other by their occupations) hit it off right away, and their bond only deepens. And it’s predictable — we know where it’s going as soon as the gardener complains about mysterious pain in his abdomen. Yet it’s never boring, because Becker packs it with minor-key fissures and delights. He doesn’t ignore the glaring socioeconomic differences between the painter and the gardener, but he doesn’t let them define their relationship, either. And he doesn’t assume that the gardener is a fount of wisdom simply because he’s from the country and works with his hands. (He’s a retired railway employee; gardening is his hobby.) Darroussin is too specific, too believably quirky, to be a mere symbol of the noble working man. The example he sets is to be comfortable in one’s own skin, a quality that the painter is slow to grasp. The painter’s wife wants to divorce him — they’ve been separated for years — and he resists her for reasons he can’t articulate. He has a beautiful girlfriend but is insecure about her affections and needlessly insults a pretentious younger man he sees as a threat. Auteuil, as always, is confident and compulsively watchable, and he defers the laughs to the bearded, big-hearted Darroussin, who finds a distinct, halting rhythm to his actions and speech. Hiam Abbass, currently wowing American arthouse audiences with her beauty and limpid grace in “The Visitor,” has a brief and poignant turn late in the movie as the gardener’s Algerian-born wife. “Dialogue avec mon jardiner” succeeds not because it asserts the value of uncomplicated pleasures, but because it provides them so thoroughly.