Starring Michel Aumont, Fabrice Luchini, and Karin Viard. In French with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, November 25, at the Vancity Theatre

Like films about collaboration during the Nazi occupation and extended studies of troubled family groups, plots pivoting on the problem of illegal immigration have become one of the hallmarks of French cinema during the Nicolas Sarkozy years.

Most of these dramas are what we would call “on the side of the angels” and what the French would describe as bien pensant, but there's nothing particularly angelic or right-thinking about My Father's Guest. Even more amazingly, Anne Le Ny's second feature manages to touch on the other themes mentioned above, even though the story is contemporary and there's nary a jackboot in sight.

Lucien Paumelle (Michel Aumont) joined the French Resistance at the age of 17, and he's tried to do the right thing ever since. His latest “good deed” is to marry a beautiful Moldavian immigrant (Veronica Novak) in order to keep her and her daughter from being deported. Increasingly, this creates tension between Lucien and his lawyer son, Arnaud (Fabrice Luchini), and doctor daughter Babette (Karin Viard), especially after Tatiana is revealed to be something other than a helpless innocent (although she certainly isn't the “whore” that Arnaud thinks she is, either). Money, hypocrisy, snobbery, envy, and privilege all jockey for position as what started out as a simple rescue plan grows ever more complex.

Tatiana, for instance, is more racist than even the most reactionary of her in-laws, but she's also desperate (according to the IMF, Moldova's per capita income ranks just below that of the Solomon Islands and just above that of Uzbekistan). The motivations of Lucien's children, conversely, though mainly good, are nonetheless shadowed by both selfishness and sibling rivalry.

In other words, My Father's Guest is a movie for grownups who live in the real world.