Manon des sources

Claude Berri (1986)

Better than its elder twin.  At least the characters are less unambiguous.  Seventeen years after the events of Jean de Florette, Manon Cadoret – known as ‘the wild girl of the hills’ – has taken to dancing naked on the site of the spring that, even though dammed up, irrigated the plot of the first film.  Her dancing is driving Ugolin Soubeyran out of his increasingly sensitive mind.  Manon strikes back in a bigger way by cutting off the whole community’s water supply.  This makes for a hefty slice of broad satire in the form of the locals’ reactions but the very fact that the heroine is sufficiently scheming to do such a thing is, in view of her genetic inheritance, amazing:  both her parents were paragons of virtue.  It’s striking that Manon is characterised first as a free-spirited part of nature then as a product of nurture:  her experience of life has made her hard and shrewd enough to manipulate the natural world against her father Jean’s tormentors.  It’s not clear, however, why she is a nature girl at the beginning – except to develop the plot and to ensure a striking contrast with what she does later in the story.

The beautiful Emmanuelle Béart doesn’t seem enough of an actress to get across the full force of Manon’s change of heart.  Her role is a non-speaking one for the first part of the film; once she opens her mouth, she makes Manon shallow and a bit snooty, worldly in (one assumes) the wrong way.  But Daniel Auteuil gives another strong performance as Ugolin, longing to slake (a) the thirst of his parched carnations, (b) his unrequited passion for Manon and (c) the ramifications of – and Ugolin’s remorse for – what he and his uncle César (‘Le Papet’) did to Jean.  This triple need to quench is hardly original but Auteuil fuses its elements affectingly in his portrait of a man increasing in human thoughtfulness but losing control of his life as a result.  Auteuil doesn’t make a crude bid for audience sympathy:  he earns it.  Yves Montand is subtler here, too:  guilt as well as age seems to have sapped Papet’s vitality and he keeps his feelings more hidden than before.  Montand brings off with fine, controlled power the moment when Papet discovers who Jean really was.  The tedious morality of the story requires that the Soubeyrans learn the error of their ways in-no-uncertain-terms but Claude Berri’s direction is mercifully less coercive than in Jean de Florette.  Manon’s mother reappears for her daughter’s wedding (and sings again).

[1990s]