‘My Mother’s Castle’ (PG)

"My Mother's Castle," Yves Robert's companion to "My Father's Glory," sinks its roots deep into the province of refined sensibility. This is the second of his films based on the childhood memoirs of the French writer and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, and like its earlier partner, it chronicles the life of Pagnol's parents, Joseph (Philippe Caubere) and Augustine (Nathalie Roussel). Also like its predecessor it immerses itself deeply and devoutly in the day-to-day texture of their seemingly unblemished domestic idyll.

Though ostensibly the film is a portrait of the artist as a young man, its true reverence is reserved for the dappled sunlight of Provence, for the grapes that grow in its vineyards and the wild thyme that sprouts on its hills. If the French Department of Tourism had tried, it couldn't have produced a film more enraptured by its setting, more sensitive to the allure of its way of life or more attuned to its contented rhythms. Most of all, "My Mother's Castle" makes you want to drop everything, head for Provence and snooze in the velvet shade of its trees.

But that's all there is to the film. Robert loses himself and his story in those same downy shadows. The movie overwhelms us with that after-meal feeling of lazy fullness; it's as pleasing as an afternoon nap, and about as eventful. Everything Robert positions in the frame caresses the eye, from the appealing handsomeness of the characters to the bottles of olive oil, lined up like columns of soldiers on a tabletop.

We watch longingly as the family eats its meals, imagining the robust flavors of the food and admiring the sturdy, functional beauty of the china. At the same time, the objects seem too sensuously prominent, too compelling -- more so, for the most part, than the film's characters.

There is a charged encounter at the film's center between the young Marcel (Julien Ciamaca) and Isabelle (Julie Timmerman), the mysterious, haughty daughter of a drunken poet, who so entrances the boy that she has him crawling around on all fours, pretending to be her dog. But Robert squanders the relationship, letting it drift away without resolution. It's almost as if he were afraid that real dramatic tension would carry him outside the realm of minute observation that he has marked off for himself. He has a style and he sticks to it -- let's call it French Country Antique filmmaking.

"My Mother's Castle" is in French with subtitles and is rated PG.