If quirky is your thing, then this French film has so much quirkiness it hurts. In the classic style of Hollywood screwball comedies in the 30s and 40s, Gentille presents slightly off-kilter characters in a frequently hilarious and skewed look on relationships. The excellent French actor Emmanuelle Devos stars as Fontaine Leglou, an anaesthetist who spends most of her time trying to avoid having to say yes/no to her Arctic palaeontologist/former triathelete boyfriend Michel's proposals for marriage. She is also being pursued rather strangely by a doctor who is a patient at a mental hospital (it plays on the idea of normalcy versus derangement quite clearly). You’re never really sure what’s going on in her life as you don’t actually see her work, know whether she loves her boyfriend or whether she’s even faithful to him (made abundantly clear in the humourous opening sequence).

This film is actually all over the show. It’s hard to pin down and that accounts for a large part of it being a rather enjoyable watch. However some of the comedy occasionally comes across as a little forced – and this may be due to a lack of a grounded/straight man to play the comedy off on. Someone like Katharine Hepburn always had a Cary Grant or a Spencer Tracy to bounce her quirkiness off on. Without this, the quirkiness can become annoying – (which is a fine line that off-beat comedies always have to watch for), and this is what occurs often by the end, as the what was meant to be strange yet funny becomes the already seen norm. While the film manages to keep this going through the introduction of numerous characters (the scene with Michel’s parents in particular is wonderful) there does seem to be a bit of momentum lost by the end. However, Gentille does offer a genuinely funny look at the silly complexities of how people are forced to deal with each other.—Brannavan Gnanalingam