Starring Agní¨s Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. In French, with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Monday, July 3 to 6, at the Vancity Theatre

There’s little sun but much humour in Let It Rain, the latest effort from the screenwriting duo of Agní¨s Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, who made the great Look at Me and the even better The Taste of Others. As before, she directs, and the married couple cowrites and stars, this time as an uneasy politician and an even iffier documentarian.

As in Olivier Assayas’s wonderful Summer Hours, this pastoral effort centres on siblings who attend their provincial birthplace to sort things after their mother has died. Here, it’s Provence, home to plenty of trouble when Agathe Villanova (Jaoui) returns to the old villa run by her sister, Florence (Pascale Arbillot), and the sister’s passive-aggressive husband (Guillaume De Tonquedec) in time to announce her candidacy in a local election.

The household is actually run by a lovely Morocco-born woman (Mimouna Hadji) whose smart son, Karim (Jamel Debbouze), feels stifled by racism and self-doubt. Karim has fallen in with older movie producer Michel (Bacri), who has hidden ties to the family and wants to make a film about Agathe for a series on “strong women”.

The subject here is really weak men, as issues of class and social roles in modern France are raised in many playful exchanges. (Best line, from Michel to a wet and crestfallen Agathe: “Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you can’t cry.”)

Sadly, these observations, like the rain, only go skin-deep. There’s no sense of where the characters’ beliefs, if any, came from. And some plot turns, such as the married Karim’s drift toward infidelity, seem stitched in from a hundred other movies. This Rain is pleasant, but Summer Hours it ain’t.