JEAN DE FLORETTE Movie Review

French author and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol made the first version of Manon des Sources (Manon of the Spring) in 1952, following which he expanded the same story into a two-part novel called The Water of the Hills. This was the source that director Claude Berri and co-screenwriter Gérard Brach drew from when conceiving their 1986 epic two-part screen version of Pagnol's tale, ultimately released as Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. This first part of the story, set in the 1920s, is a stately, novelistic portrait of human greed and suffering. Gérard Depardieu is Jean de Florette, the hunchbacked farmer who, together with his wife and small child, Manon, are trying to make a go of it on their newly inherited farm-land despite the ravages of drought. What Jean doesn't know is that his land sits on a natural spring that would give him all the irrigation he needs, if only his viciously greedy old neighbor hadn't plugged up the spring in hopes of driving Jean away and getting the farm for himself. That neighbor and his dim nephew (Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil) are the villains of this piece; they're as despicable as movie villains get, and we sit in our seats hoping quietly and ever more despairingly that their avarice and inhumanity will be punished somehow. But for now, it's not to be. This absorbing and physically magnificent production was a worldwide hit; the story's second part, Manon of the Spring, was released a few months later. Cinematographer Bruno Nuytten's exquisite widescreen images justify seeking out a letterboxed version of Jean de Florette.

NEXT STOP … Manon of the Spring, The Fanny Trilogy, Harvest

1987 (PG) 122m/C FR Gerard Depardieu, Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, Elisabeth Depardieu, Ernestine Mazurowna, Margarita Lozano, Armand Meffre; D: Claude Berri; W: Claude Berri, Gerard Brach; C: Bruno Nuytten; M: Jean-Claude Petit. British Academy Awards '87: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film, Best Supporting Actor (Auteuil); Cesar Awards '87: Best Actor (Auteuil), Best Supporting Actress (Beart). VHS, LV ORI, IME, FCT