Story Movie
After returning from military service, a young Yugolin decides to grow flowers, but carnations need water. His rich uncle is ready to help his nephew in the hope that he will continue his lineage. He decides to buy a field with a spring from an enemy neighbor.
Review 4K Movie
It's a story about love. Or rather, about passion.
It is a story about love, sanctified by centuries and the traditions of all the peoples of the world - the eternal, as humanity, love of a peasant for the land. But this story is about a love that kills. Slowly, gruesomely, brutally. In the name of passion for the land, an inhuman, well-thought-out atrocity will be carried out before our eyes in a slow, boring at first, very realistic manner. It will reveal that ancient, creepy, dark, coming from the same depth of centuries as the passion for the land, as well as the forgotten custom of offering human sacrifices to the gods of fertility - that heavy and ruthless that slumbers under the idyllic flair of the South French pastoral of bygone times (on the screen - the golden days after the First World War), under the good-natured thriftiness of the peasant, “a man of the people”. It is a story of deep cruel paganism and desperate struggle, full of passion and pain, told in the simple language of economic concerns and not looking for excuses for its hard-working and heartless characters.
“Jean de Florette” is the first part of the dilogy. The second movie, “Manon of the Springs,” is somewhat weaker in plot, but is marked by an even more brilliant performance by Daniel Otoya, magnificent in the role of the village fool, as well as the appearance of the dazzlingly lovely young Emmanuelle Béart. The dilogy is based on a book by Marcel Pagnol. Once upon a time, in the 50s, Pagnol himself adapted the story, taking the role of Manon his wife, and naming the whole film after her.
Pagnol knew what the story was about. He grew up on this land - though not in a peasant family, but a happy boy whose parents rented a cottage in the Provençal mountains every summer. His memories of those shining golden years of happiness molded in the lovely book “Childhood of Marcel”, which was transferred to the screen in the magnificent films Yves Robert - “My Father's Glory” and “My Mother's Castle”.
But nostalgic tenderness for the lost paradise of his childhood did not prevent Pagnol from seeing his native Provence not only as the Promised Land. Under the dazzling sky of the South, he was able to discern the sinister shadows and stories of half-forgotten crimes, which, on the face of it, turned out to have nothing attractive and poetic (and poetic, as if by the state is supposed to stories of forgotten atrocities), - only a persistent, stupid, ruthless Evil, which silently, steadily, with the indifferent consent of witnesses strangles the innocent. Though, however, no, he is guilty. Guilty, first of all, of getting in the way of the aforementioned peasant passion for the land, and secondly, of being a stranger, an alien from the city.
It is so strange that the murderers from “Jean de Florette” and the funny villagers from “The Childhood of Marcel” are essentially the same people, with the same smiles, the same talk, the same old hats, the same “glasses of red” - almost contemporaries, colleagues, countrymen...
It is not easy for us who live in the wild north, where in almost any season it is always a little too damp and dank, to understand that the southern summer can kill. But the golden sun on the screen gradually turns purple and black, though the landscape doesn't change hues, remaining just as lovely. It's just that you suddenly start to feel this ominous heat, this thickening darkness. You begin to feel the drying heat as if with your own skin, in which water, simple water, becomes a coveted value, a synonym of life.
It is good to check these feelings one summer if you find yourself in the Mediterranean. We were in Italy this summer, when the heat was rare for those places - and I remember what a miracle it was that the bright green color of fresh grass suddenly appeared, daring to turn green among the brown hot earth and sun-scorched grass that had turned into straw at the root. There was water there, there was definitely water there! And indeed, as I came closer, I heard a tiny rivulet gurgling, and then I saw the water sparkling between the green stalks. It was a divine miracle. Of course, I remembered “Jean de Florette.” That summer I remembered him all the time.
However, it was not necessary to go to Umbria to feel the horror of the situation of a man left without water under the scorching sun. It's all shown in the movie. You will feel it, all this scorching heat, and the heat and despair of a land suffocating from thirst, even if you watch this movie in a cold rainy summer, grumbling at first: “We'd like your problems...”.
... And yet this is a movie about love. About love for the earth, which may kill, but in which there is something sacred for a reason. Because the paradoxical conclusion that the soul makes thanks to this story (at least, mine) is a longing, long ago driven deep, trampled and ridiculous longing (from the ancestors, or what?) for the land, for just such, unbearably hard labor on its land, for this life away from the city, in its own house, on its own land, conquered from heat or frosts...
No one will say that Hunchback's life, sufferings and death were vain and stupid. There was, there was some high, mysterious, bitter and right meaning in them: a great, passionate, persistent, centuries-honored love for the earth... The same eternal love for the earth. Common to all three characters in the movie, bound by inseparable and invisible ties, the tragedy of which will finally become clear in the continuation of “Jean de Florette” - in the movie “Manon of the Springs”.
P.S. The movie “Jean de Florette” is played - and magnificently - by some of the best European actors of the time: Daniel Hautoy, Gerard Depardieu and Yves Montand.
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