Fanny (2013)
Directed by Daniel Auteuil

Film Review

The second part of Daniel Auteuil's ambitous remake of Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Trilogy picks up where the first part, Marius, ended, maintaining the same level of production design and quality of acting throughout, although failing to match the dramatic power of cinema's first version of the trilogy.  Not yet ready to take up the director's baton, Pagnol hired a more experienced filmmaker, Marc Allégret, to direct his adaptation of his 1932 play Fanny, and the result of this unlikely collaboration is an intimate realist drama of exceptional poignancy, recounting the multiple heartaches of a pregnant young woman abandoned by her true love and forced into marrying a man old enough to be her father.  Faithful to Pagnol's text, Auteuil's film offers plenty of heart-string tugging but it has nothing like the impact of Allégret's classic film.

With young Marius out of the picture for most of the film (he's away enjoying a life on the ocean wave), the focus this time is on Fanny and the older man who steps in to save her honour, the sail-maker Panisse.  Dispensing with much of the cinematic grandeur of the first film, Auteuil crafts a much more confined and intimate drama, which is sustained by the totally riveting performances from cinematic ingénue Victoire Bélézy and old hand Jean-Pierre Darroussin.  Bélézy does a particularly fine job here, maintaining our sympathies when her character, the eponymous ill-fated Fanny, could so easily become tiresomely maudlin.  In her scenes with Marie-Anne Chazel, who plays Fanny's overly prim mother with just a hint of comic hysteria, she appears strong-willed and resilient, very different to the fragility and tenderness she reveals in her scenes with Darroussin.  His presence hardly missed, Raphaël Personnaz returns at the end of the film for its tear-jerking denouement, setting the scene for the third and final instalment in the saga, which is due to be released in 2014.

Film Synopsis

Fanny, in love and abandoned, discovers that she is pregnant with Marius's child.  She finds herself in an impossible position and has no choice but to accept a proposal of marriage from Honoré Panisse, a successful busniness man who is many years her senior.  Naturally, Fanny wins the approval of her mother by making this move, and also that of Marius's father, César, who wants only the best for his grandson.  Several months after the wedding and the birth, Marius returns from his long voyage and realises that his future is with Fanny, the only woman he could ever love...