Laure Calamy in My Donkey, My Lover, & I (Greenwich Entertainment)

Fancy a road trip/buddy comedy where one of the friends is a mule named Patrick? You might if his co-lead is Laure Calamy, the human star of Caroline Vignal’s fizzy, feel-good comedy. Calamy creates a full-fledged character out of a cosmically bird-brained ditz, and makes us love her. And as it turns out, the mule makes a pretty charming companion too.

Schoolteacher Antoinette Lapouge (Calamy) is a hopeless romantic—and a clueless one. She belts out an embarrassingly amorous power ballad alongside her class of children at a school recital, provoking confusion and raised eyebrows from parents. Recent comedies often put their characters through cringeworthy situations to the point of cruelty, but this scene strikes a gentler balance. Although taken aback by the teacher’s singing her heart out, her audience spares her a little indulgence and even seems slightly intrigued, mirroring the movie’s take on Antoinette and setting an affable tone for the rest of the film.

It seems that the target of Antoinette’s display of musical affection is an extremely unremarkable and very married parent named Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe), who, right after the performance, blows off their carefully planned adulterous tryst with news that he plans to spend a holiday with his family. Antoinette refuses to take the hint and vows to follow Vladimir on vacation. She turns up at an inn in the Cévennes Mountains and decides to trek along a famed route taken by the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, donning Daisy Dukes, and saddling up a stubborn mule for a dotty adventure.

This premise may sound thin, and it is. But director Vignal gets a lot of mileage out of a deceptively slight concept. The movie deploys a low-key charm as it explores Antoinette’s relationships to the people she meets on her journey, often bemused and oddly touched by the exuberant young woman. A scene dominated by the stern Olivia Côte (excellent) as Vladimir’s wife puts a comic spin on the consequences of adultery, while Antoinette reveals herself as not just a lovesick fool—although she is that—but a person of pluck and resilience, finding her groove in the plush pastoral surroundings. We root for her as she pushes, pulls, scolds, and beseeches the quiet, stoic Patrick, who, like his human companion, can sometimes go on an unpredictable tear.

Tender and funny as its central character, this is a movie whose lovestruck silliness you can always forgive. It believes in the goodness of the human heart, even if the brain attached is a little flighty.