Film Review
Marcel Pagnol concluded his prominent directing career by adapting four
stories taken from Alphonse Daudet's anthology
Les Lettres de mon moulin.
Three of these ended up in Pagnol's last film for the cinema (named
after Daudet's famous oeuvre); the fourth,
Le Curé de Cucugnan, was
made by Pagnol for French television thirteen years later and was
broadcast on Christmas day in 1968. Despite the time lapse
between the first three and last of the short films, they form a
complete work and are as intensely expressive of Pagnol's love of
Provençal life as his earlier, better known films.
Les Lettres de mon moulin was
photographed by Pagnol's loyal cinematographer Willy Faktorovitch and
features some of his favourite actors, including Rellys and Edouard
Delmont, who are as evocative of Pagnol's sun-drenched Provence as the
lush, rolling landscape they inhabit so easily. Of the three
episodes in the film, it is the last one,
Le Secret de Maître Cornille,
which fits most easily into Pagnol's oeuvre, and the one which makes
best use of its rural setting. The other two,
Les Trois Messes basses and
L'Élixir du père Gaucher,
are atypical in that they are mostly confined to interiors and take an
almost malevolent delight in poking fun at those of an ecclesiastical
persuasion (in his earlier films, Pagnol's mockery of the clergy is far
more restrained, albeit with just a hint of malice).
Whilst the film was a phenomenal success in France (it attracted an
audience of over two million) Pagnol was not tempted to direct another
film for cinema and instead he devoted himself to a literary
career. This he began in 1957, by embarking on his two volume
Souvenirs d'enfance, which would be
adapted for cinema in 1990 by Yves Robert as
La Gloire de mon père /
Le Château de ma mère.
Once he had established himself as one of France's leading authors,
Pagnol had no desire to return to the cinema, although the temptation
to round off his
Lettres de mon
moulin with
Le Curé de
Cucugnan, a short film for French television, was too great to
resist.
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Marcel Pagnol film:
Le Curé de Cucugnan [TV] (1968)
Film Synopsis
Alphonse Daudet, purchases a windmill in Pampérigouste, an
attractive region of rural France, so that he can write a series of
short stories about country folk. In the first,
The Three Low Masses, the devil
persuades a bon vivant priest to gallop through a Christmas mass so
that he can fill his belly on a lavish feast afterwards. In
The Elixir of Father Gaucher, a
monk manages to rescue his brothers from poverty by distilling and
selling a powerful elixir, but ends up as a chronically alcoholic
martyr. Finally, in
The
Secret of Master Cornille, an elderly miller struggles to keep
up the illusion that his windmill allows him to earn a living, in spite
of the fact that all the villagers make use of the more reliable
steam-powered flour mills.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.