Not only lost, but mad. There is no sanity in his intense focus. Is she mad? She must be. But they’re both so happy. Real life hardly seems to be a factor. We never see them eat. We never see them sleep. We know they live in a room above the shop, but we don’t see it.
Their days pass in a serene parade, sometimes enlivened by his fondness for dancing to recordings of the music of The Arabian Nights. He can’t dance, as he is the first to admit. But what he does is wonderful, and Rochefort’s gyrations, always with a solemn face, are very funny. Why this music? Why this dance? Why do we need to ask?
She smiles. She is radiant. She is kind, gentle, sexy. They are always in heat. While she is performing a shampoo, he kneels on the floor behind her and caresses her to ecstasy. They make love on the red leather bench. They’re in full view, but nobody ever seems to see them. They make each other very happy.
Leconte, working from his own screenplay, interrupts their solitude with customers. Two inseparable friends, always deep in a dispute. A little boy who does not want to have his hair cut. A husband who dashes in to hide from his fearsome wife, who follows him. There aren’t a lot of customers, which is all right with them. She is patient, attentive, expert. He is tactful and always helpful. The sun shines in. Their wedding day takes place in the shop, with old Monsieur Ambroise in attendance.
In a rare visit outside the shop one Sunday afternoon, they visit Ambroise in the retirement home where he lives. He observes that the home’s gardens, so well-tended, have a sort of film over them, an aura: “These are the last trees and flowers these old people will ever see.” He is not consoled by retirement. He was happy, now he is lonely. His relatives visit but are impatient to leave. In such small dark clouds as these, Leconte allows his lovers to observe that nothing is forever.
Patrice Leconte is a director who should be better known. Like Ang Lee, he never repeats himself. Each film seems a fresh start from a new idea. His flawless Monsieur Hire (1989) is also about a fetishist—a voyeur. That is its only similarity with The Hairdresser’s Husband. His Ridicule (1996), set at the court of Louis XVI, involved a provincial farmer, much agitated about the need for irrigation. Told that the king listens to no one who doesn’t amuse him, he learns to be funny. He was never funny before. The Widow of Saint-Pierre (2000), based on a true story, involves a man condemned to the guillotine on a remote French island off Canada. The colony lacks a guillotine. The courts are sticklers for the letter of the law. The condemned man and the warden’s wife undergo a transformation during the wait for the guillotine to arrive from France. It is very deep and moving.
My Best Friend (2006) is about a man who learns he truly has no friends, only acquaintances and associates. He hires a sunny taxi driver to instruct him in the act of making friends. Man on the Train (2002) stars French rock star Johnny Hallyday and Jean Rochefort again, as a bank robber and a retired literature teacher. Circumstances lead the teacher to admit the robber as an overnight guest. Each old man envies the other, who represents a road not traveled. The Girl on the Bridge (1999) is about a professional knife thrower who hangs around bridges looking for young women about to leap off them. He offers them a job as his target. There is always the possibility he might miss. If he doesn’t, they get an interesting job with lots of travel. If he does hit them, well, what do they have to lose?
I have never seen a bad film by Patrice Leconte. As you can see, they share no genre. They share no style, either, except his clear, sure strokes at the service of his story. I have been thinking for years of including him in the Great Movies collection, but delayed, unable to choose among them. I could make an excellent case for every film I mentioned.
What they have in common is his gift for inventing unforgettable characters. Some are remarkable only in their ordinariness. They have this in common: They’re fascinating. Admit that in my brief remarks about those titles you were intrigued by every character I mentioned. The French have affection for Leconte, because he doesn’t disappoint them. But in the world market, he offers no hook or “high concept.” For the global mass audience, if it requires an entire sentence to describe a film, that’s too much complexity to deal with. Yet Leconte’s kind of film is why I go to the movies with hope.
You will have noted I revealed nothing of the destiny of his couple who are so very happy. Surely their happiness cannot last forever? No? Are you sure? Surely we believe we are immune to the sad outcomes experienced by others. I want to say this much about the ending: It is a happy ending. Happy for her, happy for him, and their love remains inviolate and undiminished. Can you deny that?
Jean de Florette
PG, 121 m., 1987
Gérard Depardieu (Jean de Florette), Yves Montand (Cesar Soubeyran), Daniel Auteuil (Ugolin), Elisabeth Depardieu (Aimee), Ernestine Mazurowna (Manon). Directed by Claude Berri and produced by Pierre Grunstein. Screenplay by Berri and Gérard Brach, based on the book by Marcel Pagnol.
If you were to walk into the middle of Jean de Florette, you would see a scene that might mislead you.
In the middle of a drought, a farmer is desperate to borrow a mule to help haul water from a nearby spring. He asks his neighbor for the loan of the animal. The neighbor is filled with compassion and sympathy, but simply cannot do without his mule, which he needs in order to farm his own land and provide for his own family.
As the neighbor rejects the request, his face is so filled with regret you’d have little doubt he is one of the best of men.
Actually, he is a thief. And what he is stealing is the joy, the hope, and even the future of the man who needs the mule. Jean de Florette is a merciless study in human nature, set in Provence in the 1920s. It’s the story of how two provincial French farmers systematically destroy the happiness of a man who comes out from the city to till the land.
The man from the city is Jean de Florette, a hunchback tax collector played by Gérard Depardieu, that most dependable of French actors. When he inherits a little land in Provence, he is only too happy to pack up his loyal wife and beautiful child and move to the country for a new beginning. He wants to raise vegetables and rabbits on the land, which, according to the map, includes a fresh water spring.
His neighbors have other ideas. The old local farmer (Yves Montand) and his son (Daniel Auteuil) long have had their eyes on that land, and they realize if they can discourage the newcomer they can buy the land cheap. So they do what is necessary. They block the spring with concrete, conceal its location and wait to see what happens.
At first, nothing much happens. There are steady rains, the vegetables grow and the rabbits multiply. Then comes the drought, and Depardieu is forced to bring water from a neighboring well, using his mule and his own strength, turning himself into a beast of burden. From morning to night he plods back and forth under the burning sun, and his wife helps when she can, but the burden is too much and the land surely will die. It is then that he asks for the loan of Auteuil’s mule, and is turned down.
The director, Claude Berri, does not tell this story as a melodrama; all of the motives are laid out well in advance, and it is perfectly clear what is going to happen. The point of the film is not to create suspense, but to capture the relentlessness of human greed, the feeling that the land is so important the human spirit can be sacrificed to it.