Word: pagnol
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...course, the same bliss that director Claude Berri offered us in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, his adaptations of Marcel Pagnol's fictions. And indeed, Uranus (it takes its title from the dark, cold planet) resembles those limpid works in its setting, tone and sympathetic anatomy of a provincial society...
...Pagnol was in his 60s when he wrote his Memories of Childhood. Robert, a friend of Pagnol's, was 70 when he directed the film adaptations. These are old men's movies about youth. They tell us that memories are precious because life is short. Mothers will die in their prime, and boys will fall in the Great War -- a war that ended an age of innocence and left Pagnol with a bittersweet remembrance of things lost...
Best known in the U.S. for his 1930s films Topaze, Fanny and The Baker's Wife, and for a recent two-part movie hit (Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs) based on his novels, Pagnol is a figure unique in 20th century French culture. He might be described as the Provencal Mark Twain, if that beloved "regional" writer had also made movies championed by critics and the public. He could be a French Frank Capra, if that populist filmmaker had also been his country's most popular playwright. Pagnol introduced French theatergoers to the accent...
...Here is the Pagnol family: father Joseph (Philippe Caubere), a schoolteacher; mother Augustine (Nathalie Roussel), a seamstress; little Marcel (Benoit Martin, then Julien Ciamaca), a serious, curious child who reads everything he can find, from cookbooks to soap wrappers. In the first hour of My Father's Glory -- the most luminous part of either film, or of any film since charm went out of fashion -- Joseph anxiously faces a new teaching job, Augustine gives birth to a second son (Victorien Delmare), and Marcel's maiden aunt (Therese Liotard) meets her future husband (Didier Pain) while walking Marcel in the park...
Perhaps a childhood this idyllic could exist only in an aged writer's reverie -- in an attic stocked with antiques all the more precious to him because he alone realizes their value. The great gift of Pagnol's memoirs is to create a universal family out of what may have been his private fantasy. They capture the anecdotes of a Provence youth in a scrapbook that all can take delight in. This brace of films is a gift to moviegoers too. It might have fallen into their arms out of an impossibly sunny...