Peau Neuve

The kind of film perhaps only the French would make, would want to make, and would carry off so subtly. It focuses on a bored video-game tester who, much to the puzzlement of his wife and four-year-old daughter, decides - at the suggestion of a careers officer he's had a fling with - to throw it all in and take a four-month course training to operate bulldozers. Miles from the home he now visits only occasionally at weekends, he is befriended by, among others, a dimwitted bulldozer fanatic whose obsession, sadly, doesn't provide him with the ability to drive the machines. The film simply assesses the pressures exerted on the protagonist's home life by his new relationships, interests and aspirations, with a low key realism wholly lacking in Loachian didacticism; for all its lack of sentimentality, this is a warm, witty, perceptive and utterly credible study of the kind of ordinary people seldom found in western movies.