Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Jean de Florette
1986 · Claude Berri · Jean de Florette on Sightlines
A hunchbacked man carries water across a hillside in the summer heat. He has done it before, and he will do it again tomorrow. The wells are far away, the plants are thirsty, and the sun Bruno Nuytten photographs so beautifully is the same sun that is drying out the ground under his feet. Further off, two men are watching him.
That is most of Jean de Florette, and it is enough. Jean Cadoret (Gérard Depardieu) has inherited a farm in the Provençal hills of the 1920s. He arrives with books, a plan and the confidence of a former tax collector who believes farming is a problem that reason can solve. He is right about a lot of things. He is wrong about one, and we know it from the start. There is a spring on his land, and his neighbors, the old patriarch César Soubeyran, called Le Papet (Yves Montand), and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil), have secretly blocked it up. They want the water for Ugolin's carnations. So they wait.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books about cinema, gives us a useful name for the kind of story Jean thinks he is in. He calls it the action-image. A character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the change produces a new situation. In what Deleuze calls the large form, a whole milieu presses on the hero (a desert, a frontier, a drought) until his effort transforms it. Jean is built for this kind of story. He measures, calculates, digs and carries. Everything he does is aimed at the land.
Berri, following Marcel Pagnol, has rigged the machine. The situation Jean is reading is false. His labor is real and his intelligence is real, but the hidden act that decides everything happened offscreen of his knowledge and in full view of ours. In Deleuze's account, the classical action story breaks down when the hero can no longer respond to what he sees. Here the hero responds perfectly well. He is responding to the wrong thing.
So where does the drama live? In us. Deleuze took from Hitchcock the idea of the relation-image, or mental image: an image whose meaning lies in a relation the viewer holds, a third term beyond the person acting and the act itself. Hitchcock's famous example of suspense is the bomb under the table that the audience can see and the characters cannot. Berri shows us the bomb early and then leaves it there for a whole summer. Each hopeful scene of Jean at work, each plan he explains to his wife and daughter, gets doubled by what we know. The spring becomes what Deleuze calls a symbol, a single object that holds the film's whole organizing relation: water, property, knowledge, and the distance between the people who have them and the man who does not.
Now the uncomfortable part. Inside the film, the only other people who know what we know are the Soubeyrans. Berri arranges his space around watching. Ugolin and the Papet keep looking on from a distance, and the village around them stays silent, which is a way of taking part. Our position in the story is their position. We feel horror where they feel patience, but we are seeing the same thing from the same distance. The film keeps asking a question it never states aloud: what is the difference between a spectator and an accomplice?
There is an older layer under the postcard, and here Deleuze's impulse-image helps. He uses it for films in which a recognizable social world (he calls it the derived milieu) turns out to be the surface of something more primitive, an originary world of appetite, with a slope running downhill toward exhaustion. Berri's Provence is golden and abundant when it rains. When the rain fails, it shows its originary world: water, land, the family name. Montand never plays the Papet as a melodramatic villain. His evil is calm and rooted in inherited pride, almost geological. The slope is what the editing lets us feel. Jean keeps making the same trip to the far wells, and the film holds those trips long enough that we watch them cost him, and cost his family, a little more each time. This is suspense built on inevitability rather than surprise.
The score points the same way. Jean-Claude Petit built it on a theme from Verdi's La forza del destino, The Force of Destiny, usually heard on harmonica. A small village feud gets the scale of classical fate. Nobody in this film acts freely in the way Jean believes he does.
The craft debts are clear. Pagnol shot Angèle in 1934 on real hillsides instead of studio sets and let the dry terrain and the regional dialect carry a peasant tragedy. Renoir's Toni, produced under Pagnol in the Midi, set unglamorous workers in real landscape with natural ambient sound, the strand of location realism that André Bazin and the neorealists would later treasure. Berri and Nuytten take that grammar and scale it up. La Femme du boulanger gave Pagnol's cinema the village as a watching chorus that judges the outsider, and Berri's blocking around the Soubeyrans comes straight from it. Pagnol's own Manon des Sources of 1952 supplied the plot mechanism of the stopped-up spring and the two-movement design. Gervaise had shown what a lavish, restrained literary adaptation could look like, and The Return of Martin Guerre had recently brought a closed rural community and a secret scheme about land and inheritance back to French screens.
What Berri added was a wager on scale. He shot the two films together as one long campaign in Provence, because the story depends on seasons, drought and crops that grow or don't, which turned the weather into a production constraint. The film became a model for exportable French prestige cinema, and it turned Auteuil, until then mostly a comic actor, into a serious one. His twitchy, gap-toothed Ugolin, torn between greed and a flicker of conscience, is the one figure in the film who seems to waver.
Critics of 1980s heritage cinema often accused it of selling a pretty past. Jean de Florette uses that prettiness as a weapon. The more beautiful Nuytten makes the hills, the crueler they get, because we know the water is there.
So when you watch, keep an eye on the distance between the men on the ridge and the man with the water. Notice how often Berri puts it on screen, and notice where he puts you. That distance is where the film lives.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — Jean, the book-guided scientific farmer, reads his milieu (drought, a stony farm) and throws all his labor at transforming it: plans, wells, hauling water from far afield
- relation-image (mental image) — Structural dramatic irony: the audience knows from the outset that the spring is blocked and Jean does not, so every scene of his hopeful labor is watched with dread; the meaning lies in a relation the viewer holds
- symbol — The blocked spring condenses the film's organizing relation of water, property and hidden knowledge between the Soubeyrans and Jean
- derived milieu / originary world — Nuytten's golden, picturesque Provence turns bleached and merciless as the water fails, and the village's silence and the Papet's inherited pride reveal a primitive world of land and water beneath the pastoral surface
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — Patient, accretive editing of the repeated trips to distant wells through a hot summer, each one visibly breaking Jean's health and wearing on his wife and daughter