Directed by Trent Carlson. Starring Dov Tiefenbach, Fred Ewanuick, and Tony Conte. Rating unavailable.

My plumber would certainly disagree, but few people can imagine a more unpleasant job than dealing with irate motorists day after day. Would-be filmmaker Lonny (Flower & Garnet's Dov Tiefenbach) has a mountain of unpaid parking tickets when he decides to get his revenge by doing a documentary on the white-clad fascists ruining his world.

He's taken aback, then, by the quirky humanity of his principal subject. This is the ironically named Grant Parker (Fred Ewanuick), a stocky straight-arrow more than a little reminiscent of M*A*S*H's Radar. He views his job, and Murray (Gary Jones), the supervisor who trained him, with almost religious reverence. In their world-view, parking enforcement is a God-given method of dealing with such human frailties as sloth, rage, and being too far from the curb. Trouble is, Murray's Zen-like approach has landed him in the hospital, seemingly the victim of a motorist insufficiently mollified by his carefully applied use of courtesy and eye contact. Also, Grant's nobility has gained him respect but not a lot of affection, as his skills with ordinary humans leave something to be desired

He's an easy subject for Lonny to mock in his í‚ ­umentary, but there's something about Grant's friendship with Jerome (Tony Conte, who brings some ethnic soul to the otherwise WASPish movie), a garrulous French-Canadian tow-truck driver who overlooks the meter man's geekiness--at least until the latter's self-righteousness gets in the way. Jerome is also getting a little distracted by his affection for the project's soundwoman, a Russian immigrant played by Czech-Canadian Diana Pavlovskíƒ ¡. (The cinematographer-within-the-film is seen only once, by the way, polishing his lens at the beginning of the tale.)

Talented director Trent Carlson, working with a script he wrote with Blake Corbet, has fun with the format-spoofing device without pushing the boundaries too hard. The tale lopes along on gentle observations, buoyed by especially memorable performances from Nancy Robertson, as a tough-talking (and unexpectedly amorous) enforcement officer, and William MacDonald, in a change-of-pace-role as a gentle cop who would like to be a detective but "they make the test so hard." Gabrielle Rose and Richard Side play higher-ups who have some uncomfortable changes planned for the department.

With such low-key material--indeed, sometimes it reads as a bit too plain--it's all the more surprising when The Delicate Art of Parking picks up both the comic pace and the emotional resonance near the end, leading to an especially satisfying coda. And, at 90 minutes, it doesn't outstay its welcome.