Cascading through idealized scenes of nature to the accompaniment of stirring music, The Girl From Paris begins almost like a parody of an IMAX film. Passed at a gallop, the French countryside looks lovely and toothless, a bit like a dream. Cued by honking horns to pull back from the idyll, director Christian Carion reveals that it is a dream, as the rush of Paris forces protagonist Mathilde Seigner to stop staring at the lovely scenery advertised on the back of a bus and keep moving. For Seigner, however, that's enough to get her out of Paris for good. On the cusp of turning 30, she decides to chuck her job as a computer instructor and become a farmer, and she enrolls in a government-sponsored two-year training program. The film spends little time on her schooling, barely enough to subject her (and the audience) to a horrifically graphic scene of pig slaughter before sending her off to purchase a lovely, remote goat farm. The point seems clear enough: All the training in the world can't prepare her for the realities of farm life. Selling the place to her on the condition that he be allowed to live there for another 18 months, the farm's former owner, gruff widower Michel Serrault, would be the first to agree. He watches with a mixture of surprise, resentment, and admiration as she makes her new purchase succeed both as a farm and as a humble tourist attraction, since the small country farm has become something of an oddity in the 21st century. Though it would be simple to play this relationship for easy laughs and pat gags about Serrault's old-fashioned ways and Seigner's lack of experience, Carion and his gifted leads never take the easy way out. Instead, they let the characters get acquainted against the slow change of the seasons, taking their relationship along unexpected turns. The story eventually gets around to melting Serrault's heart, but it doesn't end there, and it doesn't cut Seigner any slack from the demanding, occasionally crushing routines of farm life. Instead, it finds that the beauty of nature asks for as much as it gives, and sometimes more. Settling into the quiet, life-or-death dramas of Carion's chosen corner of the world, the film pauses to explore the full complexity of a land usually glimpsed through postcards–and, of course, bus ads.