IN “A Month of Sundays”, Matthew Saville’s screenplay and direction, with a small cast led by two leading Australian actors, delivers a gentle, warmly perceptive film about ordinary people coping with ordinary-life situations that make extraordinary demands on them.

Anthony LaPaglia plays divorced real-estate agent Frank, unable to connect with his teenaged son, never making a sale, going home each evening to loneliness, unable to pass a property with a “For Sale” sign without mentally evaluating it in the jargon of his trade.

Frank gets a phone call from a woman saying she’s his mother. That’s hardly possible – she died a year ago. He learns the caller’s address and goes there. Retired librarian Sarah (Julia Blake) is a widow with a socially inept adult son Damien (Donal Forde). Frank and Sarah develop a gentle friendship. Sarah has put her large home library into piles marked by names written on Post-its. She has a reason.

Those characters and their individual situations form the essence of “A Month of Sundays”, with a minor sub-plot involving a working-class couple desperate to find a house they can afford to rear their babe in arms.

Put all these elements together, stage them in leafy Adelaide suburbs, give its serious demeanour a gentle leavening of humour from John Clarke as Frank’s boss, and you have a film offering agreeable satisfaction.

At Palace Electric and Capitol 6