Two superb films about ageing are released this week and it’s wonderful to see that cinema is still being made somewhere in the world whose main constituency isn’t adolescent males.

The son of one of France’s finest film-makers, Jean Becker, has never quite matched the consistent excellence of his father, Jacques. However, Conversations With My Gardener must rank as the best effort of his later career. Indeed, he surpasses himself with this adaptation of painter Henri Cueco's novel, which not only captures the bucolic beauty of a French summer, but also the joy of renewing a lapsed friendship, the allure of learning new things about familiar places and the satisfaction of discovering the hidden truths about oneself.

Having inherited the family home from his late mother, painter Daniel Auteuil places an advertisement for a gardener and is amused to find that the sole applicant, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, is no less than his co-conspirator in a primary school prank that got them both expelled. Their lives have followed very different paths since, with Darrousin passing through borstal and the army before spending his working life with a rail gang, while Auteuil went to private school and became a successful artist in Paris. Moreover, while Darrousin has remained true to Algerian spouse Hiam Abbass and tolerated the idiocies of his son-in-laws, Auteuil has cheated on wife Fanny Cottençon with models like Alexia Barlier, who are no older than his estranged daughter, Élodie Navarre.

As they settle into easy companionability and the unkempt wasteland is tamed into a flourishing vegetable patch, Darrousin spouts folksy wisdom gleaned from his peasant-stock neighbours and Auteuil comes to realise the error of so many of his ways. However, mortality intrudes upon their idyll and they just have time for a fishing expedition and one last lesson in art before they’re parted.

Effortlessly avoiding sentimentality, yet not chauvinist enough to eschew poignancy, this is a beautifully photographed film that revels in the musicality of the spoken word and the pleasure of conviviality. The performances are pitch perfect, with the bourgeoisly pompous Auteuil giving ground with a genial grumpiness that complements Darrousin’s homespun bluntness and makes their rather contrived relationship feel so utterly authentic. A cross between Last of the Summer Wine and My Dinner With André, this is an absolute delight.

Intelligent dialogue is also the key to Belle Toujours. This would have been notable if only for the fact that it was made by a centenarian, Manoel De Oliveira, and that he is the last suriviving director of the silent era. But this is also a follow-up to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) and it takes a film-maker of exceptional courage and confidence to sequelise such an iconic picture and make so fine a job of it.

Buñuel ended cinema’s most cynical treatise on sexual politics with Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) whispering into the ear of a devoted husband (Jean Sorrel), who begins to cry. It’s not revealed whether Husson betrayed the fact that the man’s wife, Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), worked clandestinely as a prostitute to satisfy her sado-masochistic lusts. But it’s significant that Husson himself weeps on seeing Séverine (now played by Bulle Ogier) for the first time in four decades at a concert. Moreover, as she disappears before he can reach her, she remains as elusive as she was in her pomp and Husson devotes himself to tracking her down.

Following each near miss, Husson repairs to a bar, to share his jaundiced views on the battle of the sexes with bartender Ricardo Trêpa and flirts lazily with hookers Leonor Baldaque and Júlia Buisel, who sit near the same painting of a nude that hung in Séverine’s brothel. Eventually, he succeeds in inviting Séverine for supper, but she is now a lonely widow and is in no mood to revisit her sordid past.

When Catherine Deneuve turned down the opportunity to reprise the role of `Belle du Jour, De Oliveira decided to indulge in a very Buñuelian conceit by casting Bulle Ogier and revisiting the dual actress joke in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). But Ogier’s appearance also gives greater credence to Séverine’s insistence that she is a different person from the fetishist who spent her afternoons fulfilling her fantasies 40 years earlier. Husson, on the other hand, has hardly changed at all and is as much a prisoner of his passions as he ever was.

Exquisitely photographed by Sabine Lancelin, this is an acerbic dissertation on desire, power, physicality. memory and lost time that tantalises with its wit and tainted nostalgia. Moreover, it’s an inspired exercise in self-reflexivity that exposes how rarely even arthouse cinema dares to make such intellectual demands upon its audience.