Manon of the spring.

Manon of the Spring

I DELIBERATELY waited for part two of Claude Berri's diptych based on Marcel Pagnol's late, long novel, L'Eau des collines, to come out before doing my review. But whereas I had moderate use for the first movie, Jean de Florette, I have absolutely none for the second, Manon of the Spring, in which the hokiness that merely dogged the first film becomes all-encompassing. In the first part, we watched the noble hunchback, Jean, an ex-civil servant, take over some land in Provence and try to make his agriculture learned from books support him and his wife and daughter. But the rich and mean Cesar Soubeyran, unmarried and childless, adopts his misshapen nephew, Ugolin, and wants him to inherit both the Soubeyrans' and Jean's land, especially since the latter has an all-important spring, which the two Soubeyrans cement over and thus hide from Jean, who is also abandoned by the xenophobic villagers.

Though Ugolin pretends to be friendly to the newcomers, Cesar merely stalks them from behind trees. (Yves Montand stalks admirably.) After superhuman efforts, and no rain from heaven, Jean loses both his farm and his life. But Jean's little daughter, Manon, in a scene of surpassing improbability, sees the Soubeyrans unsealing the spring; in Manon of the Spring, as a beautiful young woman, she wreaks vengeance on the villagers by sealing off their main spring. Or is it the one from her father's former estate? Or are the two connected? And is it as easy to seal a spring as an envelope?

She also breaks the heart of poor, not-so-bad Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) by refusing to marry him, even though the silly, smitten fellow--in a particularly nauseating scene--sews part of her hair ribbon to his nipple, which afterward festers. In the end, nasty old Cesar finds out something from a blind woman that only the libretto of Il trovatore (which this rather resembles) can match for absurdity. The improbably beautiful Manon (Emmanuelle Beart) is the unlikeliest goatherd since the Brothers Grimm's heroines, and she ends up getting not only the similarly angelic young village schoolmaster but also the Soubeyran fortune, after Cesar dies of no longer wanting to live--just like that, by going to bed and not waking up in the morning.

The soundtrack features not Il trovatore, but the fate motif from La forza del destino transcribed for harmonica, and reduction of every kind is the order of the day. Gerard Depardieu as the hunchback, and Montand and Auteuil as the Soubeyrans, cannot be faulted, but, once again, the true protagonist of the two movies is the Provencal landscape, sublimely shot by Bruno Nuytten, as good with a camera as Van Gogh and Gauguin were with a brush. Claude Berri's direction is simplistic as ever. When you think of what Pagnol could do filming his own material in his great early movies, you do what Berri's films so desperately want to make us do but can't. Yo weep.