Re-release for highly popular French film duo from the Eighties (Manon des Sources is back next week). Depardieu plays the hunchback peasant farmer whose strangeness causes him to be persecuted by his neighbours.
Jean de Florette is an adaptation of a French novel about the efforts of two bachelor farmers, an older Soubeyrans and his rat-faced nephew, who covet the spring on the land of their neighbour. Set in Provence in the Twenties it is a wonderful study in human nature. After the neigbour is killed by the older farmer in an angry confrontation that is made to look like an accident, the two farmers' plans are thwarted by Jean de Florette, the last heir of their neighbour and a hunch-backed tax-collector who has moved to the farm with his wife and young daughter to "return to nature" and start a farm. How these two chisel-faced farmers, played brilliantly by Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil , systematically destroy the happiness of Jean de Florette is the soul of the film.
The film doesn't create suspense, but captures the relentlessness of human greed, the feeling that the land is so important that the human spirit can be sacrificed to it. And the enormity of the farmers' crime is underlined by the deliberate pace of this film.
The villagers and de Florette's daughter Manon are very much aware of the Soubeyrans' agenda. But the villagers keep their thoughts to themselves and Manon is too young. It all ends sadly but as this has not been treated by Hollywood it is emotionally powerful without being a tear-jerker. Above all this film communicates lavishly, the beauty of the land.
Jean De Florette
Cert: PG
