A crystalline comedic mirror of French provincial life, Étienne Chatiliez’s La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille lays bare family mythologies with surgical wit. Set in a drab, wind-bent suburb and a near-identical working-class district, the film hinges on a single, combustible revelation: two newborns were accidentally switched at the hospital. From this innocuous premise blossoms a cascade of barbed social observation—on class, hypocrisy, and the pieties that stabilize small communities.