Jean de Florette (1986)

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1. 

   ClassicLady

   Greed and the inhumanity of man for his fellow man. Know your friends because your enemy looks just like him. 8 years 5 months ago
2. 

   george4mon

   everybody should see this film, it's amazing!!!!!! 12 years ago
3. 

   Siskoid

   Native French speaker or not, I was happy to have subtitles for Claude Berri's Jean de Florette, as the accents and patois of rural Southern France felt almost completely opaque to me. But the story is entirely absorbing. Farmers, a ruthless father and hapless son (Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil), have their eye on their neighbor's land and therefore sabotage his heir's chances of making a go of the property, in particular on the question of water and irrigation. That heir, a hunchbacked family man from the city, is played by Gérard Depardieu with enthusiasm to succeed despite the harsh, arid conditions of the region, and there's also a sense that the film is pitting science and modernity against folk knowledge as an additional stake. The former will win unless the latter cheats. We absolutely do not want the scoundrels to win, and prey for Auteuil to relent as he always seems on the cusp, and so if the film leaves one unsatisfied by the unfolding tragedy - a kind of redress of the Fall of Man, in a way - it's because this is a four-hour epic split in two. The next chapter, out the same year, would resolve things. But even without it, I liked Jean de Florette a lot. Berri takes Pagnol's novel (itself an expansion of one of his films) and creates a rich, detailed, lived-in world from it, where even the venal characters are interesting. 1 month 4 weeks ago

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