Word: pagnol
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Every once in a while, though, an artist refutes this gloomy view. Here it is two artists: the late French author and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol and the French director Yves Robert, who have collaborated across the generations on two airily magnificent movies, My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle, adapted from Pagnol's memoirs. These films mope not; neither do they scold. Instead, audaciously, they take a vacation from fatalism and solemnity, locating radiance in the bosom of an ordinary bourgeois family. They say that life can be beguiling, beautiful -- at least in the storybook clarity of Pagnol...
Based on a film and book by Marcel Pagnol, a French film-maker and champion of the peasantry, this two-part tale of the decline of a powerful family combines the charm of Provence peasantry with the intrigue of a Greek tragedy...
...morality. But such works require time and space to grow properly. Compression is an invitation to contrivance, forced coincidence and melodrama. And Director-Adapter-Producer Berri (The Two of Us) refused to reduce this film to that level. Using L'Eau des Collines, a two-volume novel by Marcel Pagnol (which was itself a reworking of material the author used in a commercially failed film), Berri pursued the rights to a book he loved for six years before Pagnol's widow relented to him. Determined . to make a separate film of each portion of the novel simultaneously and equally committed...
Umatilla 68 and Bend of the River today at 7:30; Marcel Pagnol's The Well Digger's Daughter Sunday...
...Pagnol's Harvest, plus a Griffith short, Thursday...