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.