Pascal Bonitzer’s “Auction” has a great story, but the movie itself is inconsistent and often arbitrary. Working from a script based on true events, Mr. Bonitzer dutifully sets out a basic trajectory, but adds narrative byways that are unnecessary when they aren’t cliches. Granted, a “feel good” movie does trade in predictability — it’s no spoiler to cite that a happy ending is de rigueur for the genre — but why the director insisted on dithering to the extent that he has is confusing.

This is especially the case when considering how Mr. Bonitzer has been around the block a time or three. “Auction” is his 12th film. Before that he had a hand in writing screenplays — 48 and counting — for directors such as Jacques Rivette, André Téchiné, and Anne Fontaine. He began as a critic at a fabled French film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, where his prose proved heady. Should your boat be floated by po-faced commentary about “the atony of commentary,” Mr. Bonitzer is your cinematic captain.

The thing is, “Auction” is nowhere near that dense or obscure.  Notwithstanding some well-deserved jibes at the art market and those that benefit from its excesses, Mr. Bonitzer’s film is light on its feet. 

The opening scene is close to brilliant: A rapacious connoisseur working for a major auction house, André Masson (Alex Lutz), along with his new intern, Aurore (a stern and steely Louise Chevillotte), are visiting the house of a wealthy dowager (Marisa Borini). The elderly woman is eager to unload a significant work of art, but when she starts opining about family, money, and minorities, a business transaction held over a cup of  tea is transformed into high farce. It’s discomfiting comedy of a high order.

Mr. Bonitzer’s script, which he wrote in conjunction with Ilana Lolic, doesn’t altogether shuck its wit, but “Auction” loses energy by becoming a soap opera or, rather, a smattering of soap operas. The give-and-take that occurs between human beings with competing desires is a subject always worth exploring, but the narrative Mr. Bonitzer and Ms. Lolic have created capitulates to cutesy-pie tactics that aren’t soft-hearted so much as soft-headed. For all its Frenchness, “Auction” unfolds with all the dramatic soft-pedaling of a by-the-numbers American romcom.

Still, the story is worth reiterating. Through the offices of a friendly lawyer, Suzanne Egerman (Nora Hamzawi), and his ex-wife, Bertina (an always welcome Léa Drucker), Masson learns about a potential big-ticket item squirreled away in faraway Mulhouse, an industrial township out in the sticks.

The canvas is located in the home of a single mother (Laurence Côte) and her 30-ish son, Martin (Arcadi Radeff). When he isn’t working in the local chemical factory, Martin hangs out with a pair of ne’er do well buddies, Paco (Matthieu Lucci) and Kamel (Ilies Kadri). They’re a rough but amiable lot, if a bit awkward around the ladies.

As for that canvas Martin has unceremoniously hung in his bedroom: Suzanne believes it is “Wilted Sunflowers (Autumn Sun II)” (1914), a painting by the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele stolen by the Nazis and subsequently considered lost. When Masson and company ascertain that it’s the real deal, they contact the descendents of the family from whom it was stolen. Bob Wahlberg (Doug Rand) is amazed at the discovery, and grateful — so much so, he proposes that Martin receive a 10 percent cut of the proceedings once the artwork goes to auction.

Given the historic, artistic, and cultural context powering this tale of redemption, you’d think — in fact, you’d hope — that it would have been granted more heft or elan. As it is, Mr. Bonitzer and Ms. Lolic alternately spend their time connecting the narrative dots to blandly reassuring effect or strewing factoids about our players that are never as revealing (or shocking) as they are intended. 

High drama, a smidgen of class analysis, and the requisite frisson of gender politics analysis are boiled down to a likable, easily digested entertainment better enjoyed as an inflight movie than a night on the town.