The Girl from Paris

Sandrine, a parisien girl, fed up with her unfulfilling existence as a computer trainer and the everyday problems of city life decides to leave the Paris to become a peasant farmer.

Sandrine buys a farm high on the Vercors plateau in South-East France from Adrien, an old peasant suspicious of Sandrine's college ideas. It's spring and Sandrine makes a good start, developing other aspects of the farm, a rural Gite welcomes travellers and school parties and a Web sites advertises goat's cheese.

Although the locals are suspicious they are perhaps more accepting of a young, dynamic outsider free of the petty local rivalries that set family against family in these close knit rural communities. This is no Jean de Florette and is illustrated when Adrien defends the changes Sandrine has made to his mates in the village bar.

However the rural idyll is not all that it might seem to city folk. The audience is confronted with graphic scenes of a pig having its throat cut to make Boudin (black pudding) and later of mad cows being killed with a bolt gun. Winter comes and the sense of despair and isolation felt by many small farmers is complete when we see Sandrine in long shot, alone in the barn after one of her goats has stillborn kids.

The film explores the conflicts between conformable but ultimately pointless city life - going nowhere in the Paris traffic and the savage beauty of life on the isolated Vercors plateau. Even the peasants shop at the local hypermarket in Grenoble.

Adrien's initial scepticism gives way to a hope that Sandrine will carry on his farm but he has difficulty with the rapprochement, perhaps caused by events in his own life. The Nazis burned his farm in '44 looking for maquisards and later Government men arrive to kill and burn his cattle infected with mad cow disease. Are the government men worse than the Germans? For Adrien maybe, as these events lead to the death of his wife.

Like the Vercors, Sandrine seems both beautiful but uncompromising but we see constant flashes of the temperament that, like the weather vane in front of her house, cause her to make sudden changes affecting those around her. She is really quite vulnerable needing the occasional love of her city boyfriend and the friendship of Adrien. Maybe it is this qualities that will lead to her eventual success?

A final comment, like many movies these days there is quite a bit of product placement - Volvo cars, Lowe mountain gear, Carrefour but the countryside is wonderfully shot.

It's formulaic, of course, but the trick with formulas is to act as if they're NOT formulaic and play it as if it were the most original story that ever came down the Pike. And that's what we get here, a charming, dazzling and ultimately Moving film that explores as if for the first time age-old concerns. Serrault has been here before in Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud so this is a good time to deal with the six degrees of separation aspect. In 'Nelly' Serrault was the older man and Manu Beart the younger woman; in Manon des Source Manu Beart tended goats and here Mathilde Seigneur does the same thing. So much for trivia. They really put more than the usual five minutes thought into this one because the credits come up over breathtaking aeriel shots of the Vercours and you can see why so many English people are inspired to buy second homes in France or even move there entirely. This is reinforced when in the first sequence we cut to Sandrine (Seigneur) caught up in a traffic jam in Paris and looking thoughtfully at a travel poster of Vercours on a bus in front of her. This is economical storytelling and in the very next scene she is telling her mother of her decision to move to the Vercours - in the Rhone Alps - and become a goat-farmer. The mother can't understand, natch, why a girl born and bred in Paris and a successful computer instructor would want to give it all up to become a sort of recluse about town. So we get the argument out of the way in the first reel. Sandrine is a gifted student, one of the best in Agricultural school and soon she is ready to invest 450,000 Francs in a remote goat farm. The farm belongs to old Adrien (Michel Serrault) and he comes with it, at least til he can move into his new flat in Grenoble some 18 months away. We are now ready for the classic battle of Old versus New, Young versus Old, initial antagonism giving way to mutual affection. Like I said, we've seen it all before. But what we HAVEN'T seen before is two Class Acts like Serrault and Seigneur and what they serve up is pure DELIGHT. We are spared nothing, this isn't a Travelogue because after an idyllic Summer comes the Winter of Discontent, so bad that Seigneur seriously considers throwing in the towel. Essentially a two-hander that stands or falls by the the quality of the two pricipals it is also fleshed out with really strong support in the shape of Adrien's neighbor and contemporary, Sandrine's colleague from Paris and sometime lover, and her mother. This is the kind of movie that Hollywood has completely forgotten how to make and which the accountants who run the place wouldn't sanction anyway. Thank God the French and other European countries can still turn them out like this. 10/10

A brave decision for an Internet-teacher in Paris: she leaves everything behind and buys a goat-farm in the south of France, away from all the things she is used to. In a remarkable way she manages to set up a guest-house and an Internet site, on which she sells her goat-cheese. The former owner, who still lives at the farm, starts so like the young woman very much. When they both suffer a fierce winter, it is the beginning of a friendship.

This is a very nice movie that most English-speaking movie goers will never see. Here in the USA it has the title "Girl From Paris", but the French title translates to "one swallow brought spring." Mathilde Seigner, unknown to me before this movie, plays Sandrine Dumez, a single young lady, approaching 30, and living in Paris. One day while running late because of bad traffic, she decides to follow her dream, to get away from the city and become a farmer. This is her story, and also how her life touched that of an old man who thought he had nothing to live for. She was his 'swallow'. Although it is all in French, the subtitles are easy to read and is not a distraction at all. I would recommend it to anyone who likes a good story.

SPOILERS FOLLOW. Sandrine enrolls in a two year school to study farming. She is one of the better students and a hard worker. She finds a farm to buy in a beautiful hilly area somewhere between Paris and Grenoble, probably closer to Grenoble. The old owner had lost his wife some years back, and was just tired of farming, but he didn't look kindly upon "school" farmers, and wasn't very helpful at first. In fact it seemed like he wanted her to fail, even though he had contracted to remain living there for 18 months. But he slowly warmed up to her when he saw how kind she was, and how hard she worked. She converted one building into a hotel and advertised it over the internet as "Balconies in the Sky." She sold her goat cheese over the internet. She worked hard every day. Her business was good.

In a key scene during the cold winter, we see him causing a problem with her hotel's electricity, and we assume he is up to no good. But, what he wanted was for her to be near him, so without heat, he invited her to stay with him in the old guest bedroom. A few days later, he fixed the problem. They shared meals and conversation, and they even danced. Not long before, a sour old man, he now had a little joy in his life.

After a particularly hard winter, Sandrine had to take a break, went back to Paris, even taught two days of an internet class. She considered whether she should go back, and decided to. The movie ends with her leading the goats back to the barn in the spring.

"The Girl From Paris" is not a film the average person would likely watch. It's got subtitles, is very slow and deliberately paced and is about a young lady who abandons Paris to live and work on a farm. But it is a lovely film...one well worth seeing.

Sandrine (Mathilde Seigner) is on a farm owned by Adrien (Michel Serrault) when the film begins. She is looking it over and deciding whether or not to buy the place. So, instead of showing the steps leading up to Sandrine giving up her old life and moving to the farm, the film is more like a snapshot of her life...a small period in which she's already made the decision and has taken classes on agriculture. This is not a bad thing...just unusual that the context isn't important to the film.

As for the elderly Adrien, it's obvious early on that he isn't happy about selling and seems to have little interest nor regard for Sandrine and her new life. He seems, at best, indifferent or perhaps contemptuous of her decision. Slowly, however, through the course of the film the two become closer, as although he's sold the farm, he remains behind in his home while Sandrine lives in a nearby trailer.

Not surprisingly, as time passes, Sandrine and Adrien become a bit closer and he actually begins to talk...something he very rarely did earlier in the film. And, at times, her life is very tough as they live in a mountainous portion of the country....with lots of snow, cold and loneliness.

While none of this sounds exciting or wonderful, the film is very nice if you just accept it for what it is. Don't expect fireworks or romance or great depth....just see two people living their lives and, oddly, you will find that you care and enjoy these little moments.



By the way, I have some words of warning about the film. It is a no holds barred look at farm life. You see a pig brutally killed with lot of blood, several cows being killed and a goat having a stillbirth. It's not a film for the overly tender-hearted....but it is what farm life is often...the good and the ugly.