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Apr 28, 2008
"Regain" : split personality. (3/5)
« Regain » has a split personality, torn between Giono and Pagnol. It is like two films : one set in the valley, one atop the hills.
In the valley, Pagnol is in control : the weather and characters are warmer, good-natured comedy scenes look and sound like breathing moments inserted by the playwright, who writes them effortlessly.
When the film moves up into the wilderness, the temperature drops, the wind gets stronger, Giono takes over.
Critics often caricatured Pagnol’s films as « canned theatre ». Giono forces the writer to become a real filmmaker.
Most of « Regain » is shot outdoors : the views from the hills render the film speechless, as the dialogues retreat before a symphony-like musical score composed by Arthur Honneger.
Nature lifts the film to the top of the hills, sometimes too high, to an atmosphere too rarefied for its own good : as Panturle climbs among the rocks, carrying Arsule in his arms, he looks very much like a French cousin of 1933 « King-Kong », or a « provençal » yeti.
The black and white panoramas from the hills are spectacular, thanks, according to the film cinematographer, to the dryness of the unpolluted air ; Robert Guédiguian’s « Marius et Jeannette » has since proved how much air quality has deteriorated in sixty years, between 1937 and 1997, around Marseilles.
As the film returns to the valley, it shrinks, often to the size of a small room, filmed flatly and frontally like the stage it is : this is true « canned theatre » land and Pagnol’s zone of comfort. Dialogues are back in the driver’s seat : Pagnol was said to spend most of a film shoot in the sound truck to focus on the quality of the sound recording.
But Giono ventures down the hills into the valley to challenge Pagnol, like a marauder raiding peaceful farmers : « Regain » lacks much of the sweet « provençal » lore that makes other Pagnol movies both so attractive and irritating.
We remain in a world of crude realities where a wife says that her husband’s father is not welcome to stay with them, but only a burden, and is herself treated like a commodity, useful only to produce kids and generate a profit for the family through her free work.
« Regain » is also split, not unpleasantly, between authenticity and theatricality.
The film was shot on location, near Marseilles ; the local cast of little known supporting actors appears and sounds as genuine to us as the loafs of bread, the wine, the wheat ; the women, with Orane Demazis’ exception, look like middle-aged housewives, their hips thick of too many kids ; Fernandel is as « Marseillais » as they come.
Strangely, the theatricality stems from the Giono side of the movie : Gabriel Gabrio was a Parisian actor. His casting was probably shocking to a 1937 audience, who knew it ; today, it matters little.
His different accent, the formal gentleness of his supposedly uneducated character add to its other-worldliness : rather than to 1937 Provence, Panturle, as played by Gabrio, belongs to the unlikely world of moral tales, ancient legends and biblical parables. He is the selfless knight Gédémus was not.
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