Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring: Eternal Springs

The Soubeyrans’ appalling victory comes of their deep local knowledge and their authority within their community. Any agricultural concern needs a plentiful water supply; for one undertaken in the arid hinterlands of Provence, a spring is the most valuable of assets. Jean is sure there is a source on his land—and indeed there is, but the jealous Soubeyrans blocked it up before he arrived, dooming his enterprise to failure from the outset. Tormented beyond reason and desperate for rain, Jean rails at God: “I’m a hunchback! Have you forgotten that? Do you think that’s easy? Isn’t there anybody up there?” The story of Jean, then, is that of a good man, disabled from birth, who is deceived by neighbors who present themselves as friends and allies but have ruthless ambitions that will destroy him and his family. He is a man so overcome by the natural beauty of the land and his belief in the goodness of people that he doesn’t see the danger he faces. In contrast, the story of adult Manon in part two is one of revenge and destruction, as she in turn learns to control the secret springs that irrigate the local land and exacts a terrible price from those who tormented her father to death.

Pagnol, the author behind Berri’s films, was one of France’s most acclaimed artistic figures, with an incomparable career in theater, film, and literature. He first came to popular attention in France in the twenties as a playwright for the Paris stage. In the thirties, he relocated to Marseille, in his native Provence, where he set up his own film studio and production company and released a trilogy of locally set films (the first two adapted from his plays and directed by other filmmakers) that remain classics of French cinema: Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936). After the war, Pagnol made the rural-Provence-set film Manon des sources (1952), written for his new wife, the actor Jacqueline Pagnol. While the film was not a commercial success, the dramatic potential of Manon, the shepherdess, and Ugolin, the local man whose love for her goes unrequited, stayed with him and resulted in the two novels of L’eau des collines, which flesh out the backstory of Manon’s father, Jean, and his destruction by the forces of envy and spite. Pagnol remains revered in France, not only for his many creative works but also for being the first filmmaker to be elected as an “immortal” to the prestigious Académie française. The election, in 1946, was a source of immense pride to him as well as to the French film world, and this recognition remains the mark of his prestige in twentieth-century French history.

Berri’s discovery of a paperback copy of Jean de Florette while on holiday in Morocco in the early eighties led him to seek the rights from Jacqueline Pagnol, by that point a widow, and to reformulate Jean as the central character of the narrative. His would be an epic production, mounted on a scale never before seen in France. Berri was already one of the country’s foremost film producers as well as an actor, screenwriter, and director. His first task was to assemble a cast that matched the grandeur of his ambitions while respecting the authentic flavor of Pagnol’s South. Yves Montand, a veteran singer and actor who had grown up in Marseille, agreed to play the part of César after some initial reluctance to appear as an elderly man on-screen (he was sixty-three). The role of his gullible nephew, Ugolin, went to Daniel Auteuil, a rising star of French cinema who was at the time mostly associated with comic parts. Like Montand, Auteuil hailed from the South of France, having grown up in Avignon, and both actors were quick to master the musical accents of their characters.

The anchor of the first film, Depardieu, was the premier male actor of the era and one of France’s most versatile and prolific screen stars. He was on a meteoric ascent, having begun the decade with the César Award for Best Actor for his role as Resistance operative Bernard Granger in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980). His talent for incarnating historical figures was in evidence in recent box-office hits like The Return of Martin Guerre, Danton, and Fort Saganne, and he would soon be consecrated as the sculptor Rodin in Camille Claudel (the directorial debut of Bruno Nuytten, whose cinematography graces Jean and Manon) and the novelist and playwright Cyrano in Cyrano de Bergerac, for which he received a second Best Actor César. A performer at the top of his game, he was Berri’s obvious choice to play the idealistic out-of-towner who rhapsodizes about the beauty of the land that he has been fortunate enough to inherit.

The real star of the films, however, is Provence itself—powerfully captured by Nuytten’s cinematography—and the region’s majestic landscape, redolent of summer holidays and lazy days in the sunshine. The land is ever-present in the lives of the characters: Ugolin dreams of tending a farm of red carnations; Jean plans to breed rabbits and feed them on squash plants grown nearby. Shots of the two men working the land are interspersed throughout, their tiny figures almost lost from view as the camera sweeps birdlike over the terrain. These moments are contemplative, inviting us to pause and reflect on the fleetingness of the characters’ lives and the inexorability of nature’s power; reminding us that as dark and tangled as this story is, and for all its characters’ complex efforts to impose human authority on the terrain and the elements, the land will endure and outlast them all. It is that permanence that puts the Soubeyrans’ obsession with property, inheritance, and the family fortune into sharp perspective, as Le Papet’s dream of bestowing wealth and status on the family line comes to nothing and he dies broken and alone, devastated by the revelation of a decades-old secret.

The films were released at a time when tourism in Provence was taking off in a major way, a trend that would be accelerated by British author Peter Mayle’s international best seller A Year in Provence (1989). The region’s appeal was further boosted after Yves Robert’s My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle (both 1990), adapted from Pagnol’s novel cycle Souvenirs d’enfance (published beginning in 1957), became huge hits in France and abroad. Of course, it is Pagnol’s own Marius, Fanny, and César, more than any other films, that have fixed an idea of the South’s quirky characters and customs in the French collective memory. The Marseille Trilogy endures as the template for the musicality, warmth, and wit of the area the French call le Midi. Pagnol’s cinematic world, which Berri recreates in a spirit of absolute respect, is one of expansive gestures and animated conversation, of idiosyncratic personalities and lyrical phrasing, and of decisions and actions carelessly taken whose consequences resonate across generations. The characters in Berri’s films have the same quick repartee, the same disheveled look, the same grounding in community as the ones in Pagnol’s work.

With shoots as lengthy and complex as those of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, logistics were a constant issue. The site for the Cadoret family farm (Les Romarins) was found in remote Riboux, one of France’s least populated villages (there were only six inhabitants at the time). The village of Mirabeau (population at the time 480) was transformed into an open-air film studio for six weeks, and locals were hired to take part in the religious procession around the fountain toward the end of Manon of the Spring. The films’ principals lodged in the village of Gémenos, while other members of the cast and crew were billeted across the region and around the town of Cuges-les-Pins. Aside from the difficulty of communication among such a dispersed team were the issues of filming in the searing heat; accessing the various sites (a road had to be built so the film equipment could reach Riboux); the Grand Prix trials taking place in the nearby town of Le Castellet; the sacrosanct French hunting season; and the vapor trails left across the sky by planes from Marseille’s airport.

In an echo of the hardships experienced by Jean and his family, one of the production’s major concerns was sourcing sufficient water to keep the cast and crew hydrated, and to feature in the film where required. Meanwhile, the risk of forest fires meant the Cuges-les-Pins fire service remained on constant standby for the duration of filming. Béart spent many weeks of Jean de Florette’s production learning the art of tending goats from local shepherd André Brunat. Montand learned of the death of his wife, Simone Signoret, in late September 1985. He took only one day off to attend her funeral.

Berri’s films are enduring exemplars of what has become known as French heritage cinema, a type of filmmaking that blossomed in France in the eighties. These movies are characterized by lavish sets and costumes, big budgets and high production values, soaring scores and stunning locations, and the presence of star actors. Many are derived from literary works or based on historical figures or events. Their classical style harks back to the highly crafted French studio productions of the forties and fifties, a type of cinema named the “tradition of quality” and condemned as staid and formulaic by the critic-filmmakers of the French New Wave. But this new kind of prestige cinema was greatly admired by contemporary audiences and fared well in international markets. Its nostalgia for bygone eras, and its affirmation of the glories of French culture and history, resonated with audiences far beyond France, and heritage cinema was promoted and celebrated by France’s Ministry of Culture for much of the eighties. Berri’s films, along with Pagnol’s books, continue to be staples of the curriculum in French schools, and they feature among the highest-grossing French movies of all time.

The image of France and French culture that these films presented to the world found favor with critics as well as audiences. Between them, the films were nominated for ten Césars—earning awards for Auteuil and Béart—and eleven BAFTAs, winning Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Supporting Actor (Auteuil). Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring were jointly deemed Best Foreign-Language Film by the U.S. National Board of Film Review in 1987.

More recently, as France went into COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée announced that scheduled television programming on France 2 would be suspended at two o’clock every afternoon for the screening of a film of “national importance.” The third and fourth films shown as part of this initiative were Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. It seems that, once again, the escape and solace they offer French viewers in times of darkness and uncertainty was undeniable.