When Balzac transferred King Lear into the nineteenth century, he created in the character of Old Goriot one of the truly comic personages of modern fiction. High tragedy can so easily became low comedy not only because we enjoy the spectacle of the high-and-mighty ending up on their backsides, which we undoubtedly do. Rather, the sight of lonely, vain, foolish, weak man defiantly struggling against his fate is deeply sad and, curiously, at the same time uncontrollably hilarious. Some kind of deep-seated reverence for the bard or for Sophocles or Aeschylus must have prevented some sharp Hollywood producers form turning Hamlet or the King Oedipus trilogy or The Oresteia in to prime-time sitcoms. The theme of the finest and most intelligent mind trying to penetrate the essence of reality by using his head as a hammer and chisel has all the right ingredients of uplift and put-down to make for good ratings.
The $70 million grossed so far in France by Jean de Florette, directed by Claude Berri, and its sequel Manon of the Spring (not to be released in the United States until later this fall) is, I think, testimony to this. Greed, cunning, and sheer mean-spiritedness are counterposed to faith, imagination, naivete, and hope in the world of French peasantry as seen by French novelist Marcel Pagnol. If it seems, in the first installment, as if the first lot of attributes will triumph, we are nevertheless served notice that this is not to be God's last word on the matter. Even if one man should fall, there are others to take up the baton.
As in all tragedies, the title Jean de Florette is the name of the hero. Played by Gerard Depardieu, the eponymous Jean Cadoret (known as Jean de Florette) is a city boy, a tax-collector by profession, who has inherited the rural idyll of his urban dreams - a small farm with a bit of neglected land to go with it. Instead of renting it out to the local peasants, who would know how to put it to good use and would bring him in a steady income, he throws up his job, packs his trunks and, together with his beautiful wife, his angelic-looking daughter, and his ponderous Victorian furniture, rides out to Provence to become a farmer himself. He thereby lives out the nineteenth-century Romantic fantasy of existing according to the dictates of Nature. "I want to be authentic," he declares at one point to Ugolin, a neighboring peasant who, unbeknownst to him, is plotting to drive him off his own land and take it over. "He wants to grow Orthentics. Everywhere - nothing but Orthentics," a bemused Ugolin reports back to his uncle Soubeyran, played with dexterity and aplomb by Yves Montand. Nature, of course, turns out to be far from the gentle, refreshing force that Jean had imagined. Nor is he content to be a small-scale farmer like his new neighbors: Having read all the manuals, he thinks big. Indeed there is something faintly ridiculous in his worship of Nature as he himself is an aberration of Nature: He is a hunchback, the offspring by a cruel trick of fate of the prettiest girl in town.
Undeterred, Jean begins farming on land with no source of water, breeding rabbits before he has anything to feed them, putting all his faith in the squash that he is growing. Where is the water to come from? Well, it will rain, won't it? Well, it doesn't, and all his agricultural enterprises come to an end. Having blithely accepted the assurances of his neighbors, Ugolin and Soubeyran, that there was no water on his land, he does not dream of doing anything so practical as consulting a dowser to verify this for him. Which is unfortunate, as not only do Ugolin and Soubeyran know
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