Film Review
The strain of trying to run an independent production company at the time
of the Occupation, aggravated by the messy break up of his relationship with
Josette Day, finally took its toll on Marcel Pagnol in 1941. After
abandoning production on
La Prière aux étoiles, Pagnol
gave up filmmaking for the duration of the war, and on the next film he produced,
Naïs, he was all too eager to hand over the directing duties
to another party, Raymond Leboursier. It was an odd choice, as
Leboursier, more experienced as a film editor, had so far only directed one
film, the lame comedy
Les Petits
riens (1942). As things turned out, Pagnol and Leboursier spectacularly
failed to hit it off and the former remained in control during the filming,
with Leboursier effectively reduced to the role of a whipping boy. It
was not a happy production.
Although
Naïs was based on a short novel by Émile Zola
(entitled
Naïs Micoulin), it actually feels like a lazily cobbled
together compendium of several previous Marcel Pagnol films. In fact,
if Pagnol had merely soldered the plots of
Angèle (1934) and
La Fille du puisatier
(1940) together, the result could hardly help looking like
Naïs
- a typically Pagnolesque tale in which a morose old farmer tries to thwart
a liaison between his daughter and a good-for-nothing playboy but is defeated
by a surfeit of thickly ladled on niceness. The characters, the story,
the setting are all quintessential Pagnol, and yet the end result feels like
a mere imitation of the writer-director's previous films. The winning
formula has turned a tad stale and predictable with over-use.
The uneven direction aside (clearly the result of conflict between two cooks
both equally intent on spoiling the broth), the main failing with
Naïs
is that
none of the principal characters succeeds in being more
than just a shallow example of a Pagnol archetype. Toine, the lovelorn
hunchback, is the stock naive loser (effectively an amalgam of Jean de Florette
and Ugolin). Frédéric is just a rehash of Pagnol's urban
Don Juan types, the sort that exist only to deflower innocent country girls.
Naïs is the epitome of such a girl, too pretty and too silly for her
own good. And Micoulin is the archetypal over-protective father, the
kind that is ready to eviscerate any man who comes within a mile of his daughter
with lustful intent. Pagnol's characters were never particularly deep
or subtle, but here the characterisation is so flat it is cringe-worthy,
and the fact that the film stands up as well as it does can only be explained
by the calibre of the cast that Pagnol was able assemble for the film.
First and foremost, there is Fernandel in what is beyond question one of
his finest screen roles. His character, the unfortunate Toine, is the
only one that rings true, and the only one for which Pagnol appeared capable
of writing convincing, un
platitudinous dialogue.
Having worked with Fernandel already on three films -
Regain (1937),
Le Schpountz (1938) and
La
Fille du puisatier, Pagnol knew the actor almost inside-out by this time
and gave him a perfectly made-to-measure role that would show him at his
best. It depressed Pagnol no end that Fernandel wasted so much of his
career in third rate comedies and here he allows the actor to show what a
great talent he really was - not a second-rate funny man, as comes across
in so many of his films, but an exemplary dramatic actor, one with the capacity
to move an audience to tears with the most magical of performances.
It is only in the scenes with Fernandel that
Naïs matches up
to the high standard of Pagnol's previous films, and his last scene with
Germaine Kerjean, right at the end of the film, is one of heartrending poignancy.
Jacqueline Bouvier, by contrast, is
totally miscast in the title role
of Naïs (as she would be in pretty well every subsequent Pagnol film).
The character is supposed to be a simple, fairly ordinary looking country
girl (at one point, she describes herself as plain), but the overly made-up
Bouvier looks more like a deb's delight, dolled up to resemble a fairytale
princess with none of the
naïveté that the part demands.
Pagnol was obviously too smitten with Bouvier to realise she was totally
unsuitable for Naïs - he married her not long after the film was completed
and ruined his subsequent films by giving her the lead female role.
Raymond Pellegrin is a somewhat better choice for the part of Frédéric,
but his is a difficult character to engage with. He just comes across as
a smooth-talking rogue, and it is hard to fathom Toine's generosity towards
him, let alone Naïs's infatuation for such a blatant scoundrel. Henri
Poupon does what he can in the role that was clearly written with Raimu in
mind, but, ill-served by some risible dialogue and laughably bad characterisation,
he fails to convince and ends up looking more like a misplaced psychopath
than an over-attentive father. Of the supporting actors, only Germaine
Kerjean appears comfortable in the film and able to give a performance that
matches up to the excellence of Fernandel's.
On the casting front
Naïs is a pretty hit-and-miss affair,
and things are not helped by a patchy script and even patchier direction, but
the film still has its charms. It may not be classic
Pagnol but it has one ace up its sleeve - Fernandel at his very best. Maybe
this was why the film was so well-received on its first release in France
in 1945, when it attracted an audience of just under three and a half million.
Pagnol was wise, however, not to pick up the director's credit.
© James Travers 2016
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