LIKE the protagonist of his delightfully quirky new film, Belgian writer-director Benoit Mariage was a newspaper photographer — and “The Carriers Are Waiting” is worth seeing for its gritty, artfully composed black-and-white images alone.

Roger (Benoit Poelvoorde), who mans a police scanner for the ironically named Daily Hope newspaper, is a major control freak. He compulsively and artfully rearranges the miseries (car wrecks, hail storms) he records and checks his daughter’s stockings for runs.

He’s exasperated by his Elvis Presley-worshiping teenage son Michele (Jean-Francois Devigne), who aspires to nothing more than doing weekly segments on movie bloopers for the local radio station. Roger decides that Michele should break the world’s door-opening record and win a sedan in the process.

As the reluctant Michele half-heartedly trains on a doorframe in his backyard with an exasperated, American-influenced coach, his neglected little sister, Luise (the hauntingly sad-eyed Morgane Simon), is developing an innocent friendship with an eccentric neighbor (Philippe Grand-Henry) who trains the carrier pigeons that give the movie its title.

“The Carriers Are Waiting” takes its sweet time delivering its message about misguided parental aspirations at the millennium, but this gentle mixture of comedy and tragedy is worth the wait.

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THE CARRIERS ARE WAITING

Belgian director Benoit Mariage’s engagingly offbeat portrait of a family whose lives change when the father badgers his teen son into trying to set the world door-closing record. Running time: 94 minutes. In French, with English subtitles. Not rated. At the Film Forum, Houston Street between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street.