Conversations With My Gardener
25 Sept 2013
Director: Jean Becker
France
2007
109 min
In this beautifully crafted celebration of the pleasures and value of friendship, Daniel Auteuil plays a successful and affable painter who decides to leave Paris and return to his rural hometown in the throes of a mid-life crisis. At first he doesn’t recognise the man (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) who answers his advert for a gardener. The two were childhood friends and they reminisce about a prank they played on their school headmaster. Adapted from a memoir by artist Henri Cueco and directed with tasteful economy by Jean Becker, the film depicts a situation where bonhomie develops into companionship and life lessons are duly passed across a social divide.