Pauline & Paulette

The moral of this homely fable concerns not its retarded heroine - could she absorb a lesson? it would be good to find out - but her mentally normal sister, charged with mild hubris. Pauline, a childlike septuagenarian (van der Groen), worships her sister Paulette (Petersen), the local florist. The feeling isn't mutual, but Pauline is left on Paulette's hands when their eldest sister Martha cops it at the outset: Martha's will dictates that one of her surviving sisters keep Pauline out of a home - and fourth sister Cécile (Stéphane) lives with a Frenchman in faraway Brussels. Writer/director Debrauwer has some gentle fun with visual contrasts - the drab browns of Martha's cottage; Paulette's florid pinks and reds; clean, hard Brussels - and with the usual misunderstandings and embarrassments wrought by Pauline's blithe behaviour. It's a sweet, pat film, a hit on home territory, that doesn't exactly gloss over its questions, but never deeply probes them either.