MY FATHER’S GLORY
With Philippe Caubere, Nathalie Roussel, Didier Pain, Julien Ciamaca, Therese Liotard, and Victorien Delmare.
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Pagnol’s output as a writer has become fashionable again, thanks to the popularity of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring–both based on Pagnol novels and directed by Claude Berri. Regrettably, Pagnol’s special qualities as a filmmaker are still being overlooked–and I’m not even sure that his most distinctive qualities as a writer are highlighted in the Berri films. Jean de Florette and its sequel are cutesy forays into French academic filmmaking and hammy salt-of-the-earth philosophizing informed by a relish for rustic malice. By contrast, a Pagnol play like Topaze (which I know only through Harry D’Arrast’s exquisite American movie with John Barrymore) is characterized by gentleness and sadness–it’s a far cry from the melodramatic revenge-plot mechanics of the Berri films.
In a way, the whole progress of Marcel’s development as it’s casually charted in the film is from simple solipsism to thoughts and feelings in which the outside world matters more and more, in which other members of his family and his physical surroundings play an increasing role. The family moves to Marseilles when Joseph gets promoted, Augustine’s sister Rose (Therese Liotard) meets and marries a portly fellow named Jules (Didier Pain), and Augustine gives birth to another son and then a daughter.
Sentimental, old-fashioned stuff to be sure–but the simplicity and physicality of Robert’s film is effective mainly because it serves to put across this questionable vision. (Only a selective censorship and simplification of the past–such as that represented by Main Street, USA, in Disneyland, where every brick and shingle and gas lamp is five-eighths the original size to make it more toylike and containable–can make it wholly unproblematical and simple in relationship to the present.) This vision harks back to a feeling of affection and tenderness toward the past and what might be called a “faith in the image” that used to be commonplace in many of the most routine American kitsch movies of the 40s and 50s–not the authentic classics like The Magnificent Ambersons and Meet Me in St. Louis but sillier movies like Cheaper by the Dozen, Centennial Summer, On Moonlight Bay, Summer Holiday, and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, among many others.
