Jean de Florette & Manon de Source (戀戀山城、恩怨情天)

There was no concert for me this weekend. Instead, I went to see two films based on a 1953 4-hour long film by Marcel Pagnol, drastically cut at the time by the distributors for commercial reasons and remade by Claude Berri in 1986 from the novel which Pagnol later published. It's a story of the epic battles between love and revenge among two generations of certain peasant families in the French Provence shortly after the first world war. The double-bill is featured as part of film offerings of Le French Mai this year.

The first, entitled Jean de Florette, stars Yves Montand as César  Soubeyran, nicknamed  'Le Papet', Gérard Depardieu  as Jean de Florette, Daniel Auteuil as Ugolin, Elisabeth Depardieu as Aimée Cadoret, Margarita Lozano as Baptistine and Ernestine Mazurowna as Mannon Cadoret and the second film, called Manon des Sources, additionally features the beautiful Emmanuelle Béart as the grown up Manon.

As the film opens, we see a simple minded Ugolin, one of the two surviving Soubeyrans in the region returning from war to his uncle César Soubeyran, an old bachelor and owner of a stone house and farm. He returned with a secret project: growing carnations instead of the traditional potatoes, maize, pumpkins etc. But they got a problem: carnations soak up water like a sponge. They know that their neighbor Pique-Bouffigue, had a partially blocked up spring in his land which they wanted so much to buy for growing his carnations. They decided to pay the old man there a visit but the man wouldn't sell the land to him at any price and said ironically, they could have the land only over his dead body. During the negotiations, they got into a quarrel and the man fell from a tree, hit his head against a rock and died! As they were determined to have the land, the Soubreyrans secretly went to block up the spring completely so that the land would be worth much less in case  whoever would inherit the land could be persuaded to sell it to them. T​hey then made inquiries and found out that the man had decided to give the land to his sister Florette de Berengere, Papet's old flame, who married Crespin, a blacksmith in another village years ago whilst Papet was
recovering in a military Hospital in Africa during the war. So Pepet wrote to an old friend who knew both him and Florette well, Grafignette. But the reply he got said that the day she got César's letter, Florette died and gave everything to his son Jean de Florette. Jean, a hunchback with a heart of gold, a Parisian tax collector and a city intellectual with romantic dreams of the bliss of rural life, who soon arrived with his singer wife Aimée Cadoret and their 5 year-old daughter Manon. Jean plunged himself enthusiastically into his plans of raising rabbits, and crepins, tomatoes, carrots, onions and some other crops according to books and agricultural studies about soil type, plant characteristics, statistics about rainfall etc. But he had some problems: he did not have enough water and had to store water in a cistern. But he threw his heart and soul into his project and worked day and night and spent all his savings on improving the farm but fate had it that he had to die during an accident whilst trying to dig a well: he got hit by a flying rock blown into the air from the force of the dynamite he was using to blast the well,. He had wanted to see and hear the sound of water gushing out from the proposed well but he got too near to the mouth of the proposed well for his own good. After his death, Aimée decided to sell the farm and leave. The moment they got the land cheap, the Soubeyrans danced and unplugged the hole blocking the spring. Manon sees them and understands what happened. She shrieks, runs towards the hills and decides to stay. She did so as a shepherdess because she liked the Italian gypsy couple who lived about 2 km from her house who treated her as if she were their own daughter as a little earlier, his father did not evict them from his land.

In part two of the film, Manon had grown up into a beautiful girl. During one of his hunting trips, Ugolin saw Manon bathing and dancing by the side of a pond and could never since get her off his mind. He secretly placed birds in the traps set by Manon in the hills so that she could sell them in the market and get some money and then clumsily but sincerely declared his love for her but she would have nothing to do with him because she overheard from some poachers that Ugolin and César had deliberately blocked the spring in his father's farm. Whilst looking for a lost goat, she discovered by accident the source of the water supplying water to what used to be his father's farm and also to the whole town and decided to do exactly what the Soubreyrans did to her father. She plugged it up. In no time, the whole town was in uproar because of water shortage. An emergency meeting was called during which an expert from the water resource department explained various theories about why the water dried up but could ofter no solution except for water to be brought in from elsewhere in a water truck. Manon realized the serious consequences of what she had done and confessed to a new teacher whom she met by accident but whom she fancied. He encouraged her to undo what she did. When Ungolin saw how she looked at the teacher, he realized that he had no hope of ever winning her and hanged himself on a tree. At her wedding, old César met Grafignette who told him to his surprise that Florette had in fact written a letter to him when he was in Africa to tell him that she was pregnant with his child and that she would wait for him to marry her but that not having received any reply from him, she married the blacksmith to give their child a father. Césa then realized that in fact, Jean de Florette was his own son ! He was crushed and decided that there was no reason for him to continue living. After having made a will in which he gave everything to Manon, his granddaughter, he lay in bed to die.The last hope of any Soubreyran having any male heir had died with the death of Ugolin and his death spelled the end of the Soubreyran line.

The films were excellently made, with beautiful music specially written for it by Jean-Claude Petit its theme music adapted from Verdi's opera "La forza del destino: Ouverture" (the power of destiny) hauntingly played on the harmonica by Jean and later by Manon.The acting by Daniel Auteil, Emmanuelle Béart, Gerard Depardieu and Eves Montand were uniformly good. I like the irony in the film: those who knew the truth could not speak like  Baptistine, the mute domestic maid of César and those could speak, like Ugolin and the the townsfolk, the poacher etc. would not speak: it was  through the hard-heartedness born of his greed and need to preserve his family name,that Papet destroyed his own and only hope of achieving his dream. He repented. Too late. The film portrays very well the kind of rural attitude prevailing in Provence at the epoque: its conservatism, it hostility towards strangers, the value it placed upon family honor and its land, its superstitions, its petty jealousies and small mindedness and its unwillingness to lift a finger to help someone regarded as an outsider etc. I also like the symbolic images used in the film: the central images of the film are water and land. Neither is fruitful without the other. Cesar left the pregnant Florette (motherhood) for war (masculine aggression) and the needed communication between the male and female part of humanity was lost (the letter which went astray in the war) as a result of which a physically deformed child was born: Jean, a hunchback city folk who would rely upon knowledge and science instead of rural tradition and superstition to till the land (the human unconscious and mother of all growth) to make it fruitful and raise rabbit. He died from the explosive force of modern technology. Their daughter Manon, a beautiful lively, freedom loving shepherdess tending goats (male sexuality) is also associated with the source of the spring (the water nymph of folklore) and for that reason has power over the entire town because of her control over the supply/interruption of the life giving water. What led Manon to the source of water is a "lost goat", deep inside the crevices amidst the hard rocks of the craggy mountains, and the image of the town people sucking from the tap (a phallic symbol) in the town square. Thus the film reveals the complex networks of cause and effect, the conflict and resolution of human dilemmas involving its principal elements: tradition and science, the city and the countryside, male and female, love and revenge, human initiative and the twist of fate operating through chance to produce an ironical result: the one who harms others for the sake of his own family ends up harming most himself and what he most desires; the one who relies on sheer intellectual power without assistance from tradition shall also die by the same and the water nymph of pure innocent love who reneges from her desire for revenge finally inherited both the land and its life-giving water. Only love combined with knowledge and tradition will thrive.