The films that we have an opportunity to see are highly curated in a number of ways which I am not going to pretend to fully understand. French films show up, sometimes in clusters, only for the country to vanish for a year or two cinematially speaking. In the past couple of years, we have seen a theme in French films of heavy nostalgia for, let’s say, Frenchier times. A Magnificent Life has that nostalgia in spades, as it chronicles the life and times of Marcel Pagnol, a provincial Frenchman who conquered the stage and went on to become one of France’s first great directors.

We didn’t really know who the guy was, but the movie is a charming story of an interesting life, as an aging Pagnol struggles with writing his memoirs until his younger self sort of teases him into remembering things. This is from the creators of Triplets of Belleville, and it uses 2D animation to recreate pre-War France—and mid- and post-War France as well.

We realized that we actually had seen one of his films, The Baker’s Wife, which holds up pretty well after 90 years. There’s a very French aspect to this movie regarding him being from the south of France and trying to make it in Paris, where anything other than Parisian accents and attitudes are considered comical. Besides being a reminder of Parisian snobbery, it also reminds that the world used to be much bigger, with elements inside a country being very diverse despite being roughly the same people with the same religion and the same background.

It’s a very enjoyable series of vignettes that doubtless suffers from being too French for a global market. It has not done well at the box office, and the reviews are tepid, but the Boy and I really enjoyed it. Yes, while the provincial stuff is very provincial, these sorts of things are universal: City mouse vs. country mouse, basically.

It’s also very human, and a look at an adventurous life, which used to be enough.