The Girl From Paris (2001)

I loved this movie--and I love the place that the movie is set in.  Some of our closest friends have a sheep farm and make farmstead cheeses with the milk from their ewes.  In preparation for making a new type of cheese, a tomme (which is a washed rind aged cheese), they were planning a trip to the Hautes Alps in France to work with several different cheesemakers and invited us to come along.  It was spectacular, especially Eric Randu's cheese and family and chalet in the mountains.  Such a spectacular place to be.  And that is where this film is set.Its heroine, Sandrine Dumez (Mathilde Seigner), an unhappy urbanite drifting toward 30, who abruptly decides to follow her dreams and embrace the rural life.

In true French fashion, in order to qualify to get a farm she must first clear some bureaucratic hurdles, in particular a rigorous training program (telescoped here into the bloody slaughter of a pig and a daunting encounter with a giant combine). This is no place for dilletantes who want to make goat cheese and play the guitar, the instructor says. But Sandrine is practical and serious. After she buys a dairy farm in the Rhône-Alpes region from a grouchy old peasant, she sells her goat cheese over the Internet, and converts an unused cow barn into a rustic bed and breakfast.  The aforementioned grouchy farmer is at first jealous, then prone to sabotauge, and finally concedes that she is a far better farmer than he had any right to hope for, and vertainly doesn't deserve her goodness.  There are tense moments, but this being a French film, it all comes out alright in the end.