Quite a few tears splash down in “Lover for a Day,” which tracks Jeanne after she moves in with Gilles and Ariane. It’s a surprisingly smooth transition, or so the film insists. Mr. Garrel, who shares screenwriting credit with three others (including the veteran Jean-Claude Carrière), puts a lot of words into his characters mouths, not many of them persuasive. Soon after Jeanne arrives, she and Ariane talk about love, breeze past the fact that they’re the same age and quickly shift from the personal to the platitudinous. “You’ll get over it,” Ariane assures Jeanne about her breakup, “we always do.” When pressed on who she means, exactly, Ariane earnestly replies: “I mean every woman.”

The solemnity of this exchange — with its lilting piano chords and the Raphaelite tranquillity of Ariane’s face — suggests that Mr. Garrel sincerely believes this about women, which would be fine if his characters were more convincingly individual. Yet even though each is given a moment (a near-suicide, one affair and then another), Jeanne, Ariane and Gilles stick to a disappointingly familiar script. While Jeanne embraces her role as the dejected, apparently unconscious daughter with daddy issues, Ariane plays the part of the free-spirited object of a rather different kind of paternal desire. Gilles, meanwhile, settles into the role of the obliging patriarch who’s hot or warm as needed.

There are times when the characters — and their director — surprise and genuinely delight. In one heart-piercingly elegiac sequence, Jeanne and Gilles head off together, leaving Ariane behind. As he does elsewhere in the film, Mr. Garrel introduces this interlude with a lovely piano flourish and a few words from the intermittent narrator (Laetitia Spigarelli): “That evening, Gilles went out with his daughter.” The voice-over briefly suggests the start of a once-upon-a-time story, yet as Jeanne and Gilles walk and talk, the scene becomes something far more enchanting: two people whose unforced intimacy speaks to a bond that feels shaped by a shared history rather than clichés.

And then Gilles asks, “What will you do with your life?” He and Jeanne have stopped walking, and, as they stand facing each other on a quiet sidewalk, you sense that something consequential is about to happen. They’re in long shot, the dark night holding them as if in an embrace. When Jeanne asks why Gilles cares, the camera begins quickly moving toward them, as if matching your desire to hear the answer. “Because,” Gilles says, his hands now gently cupping his daughter’s face, “I gave you that life.” Oftentimes in this film, the third in a Garrel trilogy that includes “Jealousy” and “In the Shadow of Women,” the characters merely speak words. Here, they — and you — feel them.