July 25, 2016 - Old Yorker

Jean de Florette

July 25, 2016 Old YorkerFilm review

Claude Berri (1986)

Two dishonourable French rustics – wily old bachelor César (‘Le Papet’) Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his rodent nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) – want a piece of land inherited by Jean Cadoret (Gérard Depardieu). (Papet and Ugolin have already accidentally-on-purpose bumped off the previous landowner.) Jean – a naïve, nature-loving hunchback – gives up his job in a tax office and comes to the Provençal countryside with his wife and daughter, determined to cultivate the notoriously dry terrain. The Soubeyrans dam up the spring that irrigates it – and the other locals aren’t much friendlier to the newcomers. The noble Jean and his (even nobler) mule keep trekking miles to get a few buckets of water from a neighbouring spring. This is located the other side of the Italian border and its kind owners represent a spiritually different country from the callously self-serving one that the Soubeyrans inhabit. The water isn’t enough, however, to combat the drought and save Jean’s crops (or his rabbits, since vegetables aren’t sufficiently tear-jerking). Jean’s eventual fate demonstrates that it never rains but it pours.

This reductio ad absurdum may irk (the many) admirers of Claude Berri’s adaptation of the first part of Marcel Pagnol’s two-volume novel, The Water of the Hills[1], announced on its British television premiere at Christmas 1990 as ‘a classic … said to be among the finest films of the last 25 years’. (I’ve also heard Jean de Florette described as ‘so French’ – this is meant to be a compliment.) The film may be a classic of cinematic kidology: with its photogenic landscape and weather, water-of-life-and-goodness symbolism, lack of subplots and emphatically one-dimensional characters, it fools people into thinking it must be saying something fundamental about the human condition. Although Jean is purely virtuous and innocent and Papet is absolutely rascally, the monotony of the two is unbalanced. In one case, the performance as well as the conception is to blame: evidently relishing the role, Yves Montand makes Papet’s slyness relentlessly spirited and showy. In the case of Jean, it’s the character and not his interpreter who’s the problem. Gérard Depardieu isn’t exactly miscast: if anyone could humanise Jean, it would be he. But, except in lovely, easy moments with his daughter Manon (Ernestine Mazurowna), this Good Man resolutely refuses to come to life – even though Depardieu is impressive in his ah-ye-cruel-gods outburst when a rainstorm passes tantalisingly close by. Jean has been so long- suffering until this point that his loss of temper is water in the desert in itself. (The film is better when people raise their voices: the moment near the end when Manon sees what Ugolin is up to at the dammed spring, and she cries out, really is resonant.) The only major character with the potential to surprise is Ugolin and Daniel Auteuil gives by far the best performance. You can see intimations of morality behind the bad teeth and the animal cunning: Auteuil conveys well Ugolin’s realisation that his and Papet’s shabby trick is generating dreadfully bigger consequences.

A friend tells me the film is about how the pure get done down by the not-so-pure. This thesis may or may not be true (or worth demonstrating in a drama). What’s so dreary about Jean de Florette is the implication that you can spot the pure because they’re always smiling at each other and Nature and never exchange cross words (until Manon gets a ticking off from Jean when she reasonably compares Ugolin to a rat). You long for Jean’s wife (Elisabeth Depardieu) to tell him just once to stop being a fool and to go back to the office job. Instead, she suffers (and suffers) exquisitely. The haunting/insistent theme music is adapted by Jean-Claude Petit from La forza del destino[2]. In the blissful moment when they first move into their new home, Jean’s wife (an opera singer) trills the tune and he accompanies her on the mouth organ. At least the awful series of events that overtakes the family deprives them of any excuse for an encore.

[1990s]

[1] The second volume, Manon des sources, became a film sequel to Jean de Florette.

[2] It was later immortalised in a series of Jean de Florette-inspired commercials for Stella Artois.

Ghost

July 25, 2016 Old YorkerFilm review

Jerry Zucker (1990)

A huge commercial success, this pompous whimsy is an object lesson in understanding your audience and giving it what it wants. Sam, a young banker who uncovers a money-laundering operation at his place of work, gets bumped off by the swindlers’ hit man then hangs around as a ghost to protect his loving girlfriend Molly from the baddies and bring them to justice (ie violent death followed by exit to hell pursued by menacing black blobs). Sam gets in touch with Molly through a fake medium who has to come to terms with being the genuine article. It sounds like a comedy (and is in most of the bits involving the medium) but that’s without reckoning on the supernatural manipulative resourcefulness of the screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, and the director, Jerry Zucker. Ghost is also a thriller and a moral fable and a swoony, humourless love story with Sam and Molly enjoying plenty of photogenic physical and spiritual contact in life and after his death. Zucker and Rubin never miss a trick. For example, Sam announces he’s taking Molly to the theatre to see Macbeth: no sooner has the spectre of snobby culture raised its ugly head than he reassures us that Molly ‘just likes to see guys wearing tights’. Sam, as any regular guy should, snores through the performance. This would be OK in a thoroughly philistine comedy but is harder to stomach in a movie that often takes itself seriously. And while you might think it a waste of screen time for Sam’s ghost to struggle with the problems of passing through doors and making objects move by telekinetic ‘focus’ (isn’t that expected of screen ghosts?), his painstaking efforts involve special effects – which must be a good thing because it’s a crowd-pleasing thing.

As the hero, Patrick Swayze doesn’t fully convince you that his mind has survived death, which, in this film, appears to mean nothing more than aggravated communication problems. In this first phase of the afterlife (he goes to heaven once he’s seen Molly right), Sam isn’t endowed with any clairvoyant or telepathic powers. It takes him ages to realise he can’t be seen or heard and he’s baffled by Molly’s initial scepticism when the medium first goes to her. (Then, once Molly’s convinced, she’s baffled by the scepticism of others.) Swayze’s blankness is convenient for the film-makers, however: you never wonder if Sam’s asking himself any posthumous existential questions because he lacks any evident capacity for thought. (In retrospect, it seems surprising that Sam could hold down any sort of job in life, let alone root out financial malpractice.) For much of the film, Demi Moore, as Molly, is strangely muffled: with her face often photographed in shadow, she seems a less substantial presence than the camera-conscious ghost of Sam. But Moore gets stronger and her underplaying more appealing; although she’s darkly attractive, it’s a relief that she’s not conventionally pretty (as Patrick Swayze is). She’s good at getting tears to run down her cheeks. The lack of imagination in visualising the ghosts makes the scenes in the medium’s quarters, with customers and phantoms jostling for room, merely messy but Whoopi Goldberg’s enthusiastic performance as ‘spiritual advisor’ Oda Mae Brown wins you over. Oda Mae’s pain at physical separation from a four-million-dollar cheque is far more intense (and funny) than anything to do with Sam and Molly’s loss of each other.

With Tony Goldwyn as the couple’s emphatically shifty best friend (who turns out to be the arch, snivelling villain of the piece). The score is by Maurice Jarre (he seems to have been possessed by John Williams while writing it) but the Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’ is Ghost’s real theme music and delivers the emotional goods. Photographed by Adam Greenberg; snappy editing by Walter Murch.

[1990s]