My Mother's Castle.

If, however, you are looking for something gentler and sweeter, but that still eschews the vulgar escapism thrown at you nowadays from every side, there remains an attractive tertium quid in the double-header the gifted Yves Robert has fashioned from the childhood reminiscences of that racy and jovial French writer, Marcel Pagnol. Remembered most for his plays Topaze and the Marius Trilogy, Pagnol was also a filmmaker of distinction. Recently, we had Claude Berri's twin films, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, based on Pagnol's most ambitious novel; now Robert has made his sibling movies, My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle, from the first two tomes (1957) of Pagnol's four-volume memoirs of his childhood and youth.

Yves Robert, a marvelous comic stage actor and director of lively film comedies, made these films as a septuagenarian, and though he is a northerner, his feeling for Provence, the wonderful herb-scented hills of southern France, and for Marseille, the two locales of the movies, is as acute as it is sympathetic. Most of all, though, Robert has a splendid sense of children, as he demonstrated with The War of the Buttons (1961), and of the childish foibles and entanglements of adults, as recorded in Salut l'Artiste (1973), two films that should be on everybody's hit parade.

The subject of Glory and Castle is the way Marcel's somewhat giddy schoolteacher father and his lovely but earthy seamstress mother gravitated from the city to the country, living Marseille ever longer behind for enchanted sojourns in Provence. It's a film not so much of a boy's growing up as of an entire family's falling in love with nature, and of how one painstakingly learns to meet the demands of that exacting mistress. It is also a film about being a family--father, mother, two boys, spinster aunt, with occasional incursions by a rich, rambunctious uncle--and how these people make out with one another in one of the world's most beautiful countrysides, condignly photographed by Robert Alazraki. What gets lost in the translation and the foreshortened subtitles, alas, is the language, e.g., "a little winter sun, pale and tonsured like a monk."

Glory is good, but Castle is even better; still, one must see both, and in that order. The performances are all solid and idiosyncratic--the cast was chosen for being, among other things, able to sound geniunely southern--and, as usual, it is precisely the authentic sense of time and place that makes these films truly universal. I particularly enjoyed Nathalie Roussel, whom every man and boy in the audience will recognize as his dream spouse or mother, yet who exudes not a trace of treacle; and also the faun-like Victorien Delmare, as Paul, the mountain boy who befriends Marcel and teaches him the ropes of outdoor living. As Marcel, Julien Ciamaca is a trifle too beautiful and passive, but the world that swirls around him is full of recognizable, merrily invigorating, and cherishable life.