The Béliers are not your usual family. Father Rodolphe (François Darniens), mother Gigi (Karin Viard) and son Quentin (Luca Gelberg) are all congenitally deaf and consequently mute. This isn’t stopping the family from getting along with life. I cannot say whether their signing is authentic. But within the film’s parameters, it works. Daughter Paula (Louane Emera) has escaped the affliction.

Writer Victoria Bedos has clothed a collection of family and community issues in warm, unabashed comedy. Among the film’s many serious moments, light relief comes from Rodolphe and Gigi’s reaction to learning that they have genital thrush, Paula’s response to her first menstruation and Quentin’s anaphylactic reaction to latex when he first uses a condom. All so very French!

Any farming family would be proud of a daughter like Paula, hard working, competent, and on market days, the customer interface at the family’s cheese stall.

The film’s principal dramatic element doesn’t appear until we have become familiar with life on the farm, among the family and at Paula’s school. Music teacher Thomasson (Eric Elmosnino) resents that the powers have left him languishing in the backblocks for a decade. Then at auditions for the annual choral concert, Paula shows potential that might get her a scholarship at Radio France’s music school in Paris.  Her leaving the farm would pull down an important pillar supporting a family in which love and teamwork mean so much.

The lobby sheets tell us that director Eric Lartigau’s gentle observation of a nuclear French farming family is currently No. 1 at the French box office. Understanding why is not difficult.

At Palace Electric from Boxing Day