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“There’s something you should know about me, Max. I’m very, very choosy… I’m also very, very suspicious; very, very irrational, and I have a very, very short temper. I’m also extremely jealous and slow to forgive. Just so you know.”

Fanny Chenal letting Max Skinner know the score in the movie “A Good Year,” (2006), was my first introduction to the French actress Marion Cotillard. Ridley Scott’s movie stars a charmless Russell Crowe as a ruthless, workaholic investment broker who inherits a run-down Provencal chateau and vineyard from a philosophical, Francophile uncle (Albert Finney), becoming inexorably drawn into the sleepy continental existence so alien to his normal persona. Along the way, he is charmed by the intoxicating Miss Chenal in a feelgood movie that, whilst compromised by some underdeveloped characterisation and a maiden whose romantic resistance thaws faster than icecream in a microwave, is still an engaging experience. It’s a radical departure from the normal blockbuster genre for Mr Ridley and no less satisfying, despite the absence of CGI laden effects.