This pleasant story about a Parisian girl who takes up farming as a career has a number of deeper, interesting themes.  Of course there is the primary plotline of a competent, emancipated woman able to choose her life, her career and her friends.  But even more interesting is the process of transition for all the characters, Sandrine, the protagonist, changing careers, Adrien, the farmer retiring or not, and his old friend, Jean with his dog that refuses to leave his new Volvo.  Buried within the thematic content is a demonstration of how three different characters cope with change and a dramatization of the difficulty we experience and the courage it requires.

            The cinematography takes advantage of the venue, which is the alpine Rhone River region in France that is next to Switzerland and the Alps.  The bucolic spring and winter scenes are magnificent and in themselves worth watching the movie.  These scenes begin the film and in particular there is one sequence traveling a mountain road in which the camera simply takes off into space.  It's so startling you can't miss it.  How they were able to accomplish this is shown in the DVD segment called Behind the Scenes, which is linked in the main menu under Extras.

            The other offering from this film is that of a culture which is different yet the same as ours.  Our planet is smaller with communication and transportation optimized, technology is certainly ubiquitous in the developed countries and market forces of supply and demand are universal.  As humans we all struggle with change, seek relationships and grow through education.  Yet based on our culture and heritage, our behaviors can be wildly variant.  The one scenario in the film that brought that forward for me occurred during winter on the farm.  Adrien disables power for the building in which Sandrine is living.  How they both react, what they do and the result to their relationship gives us both an insight into their characters as well as the culture.

            This is only the second film directed by Carion and I would call it a success.  Apparently it's a sleeper hit in France. 

            Reviewed March 13, 2005

            No Rating, but probably PG-13 for one scene implying sexual relations.  However the value of the film outweighs any concern about that one scene.