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Apr 30, 2008
"Regain" : "Je t'aime, moi non plus." (4/5)
Pagnol chose Gabriel Gabrio to play Panturle, because he thought none of his Marseillais regular actors had the required talent for such a dramatic part.
As if, despite or because of his success, Pagnol could not free himself from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis Parisian actors, serious drama and Giono, a writer of novels, when Pagnol had never dared to experiment with what he regarded as a nobler literary genre.
He would only once, in 1962, with « L’eau des collines », a novel nevertheless partly based on one of his former films, « Manon des sources ».
Both Rossellini and De Sica would later praise Pagnol’s work as an inspiration for their own films, confirming that Italian neo-realism, rather than a pure depiction of reality, is a later branch of Carné and Prévert’s « poetic realism » brought to Italy through Provence where Pagnol transplanted its Parisian roots and gave it a local accent.
Like Bresson’s « Journal d’un curé de campagne », « Regain » is timeless and nearly location-less : the film takes us to a mythical Provence, closer to Pan’s Hellad than to Pagnol’s « Bar de la marine ». The ruined village atop the hills is Panturle’s Mount Olympus.
The film is cut off from the outside world, its news and concerns : the only connection to it is a railway, which will be metaphorically suppressed, as the employee in charge of the line, originally from the abandoned village, shall eventually return there with his family.
« Regain » builds its dramatic tension on a lack of drama : during the film more than two hours, very little happens, narration wise. The film benefits from this near void, because only the worst could have happened : a bad, malevolent society would have, once more, crushed the love of the against-the-odds couple who had decided to live away from it and its rules.
As we expect an unhappy end -partly due to our failure to understand the film title-, the happy one comes as a good surprise : it does not appear like the easy way out it usually is, rather like a moral of daring optimism to the tale we have watched.
Pagnol is reported not to have enjoyed the shooting of « Regain » : he felt Giono had dragged him too far from his own universe.
As if Pagnol only felt pleasure in filmmaking when he thought the artistic stakes were not high. « Regain » and Giono made then higher : Pagnol’s comfort zone was threatened, the limits of his talent were tested, he did not like the experience, though his film proves he rose to the challenge.
To prevent Giono’s world from appearing too real and attractive on screen as a result of his own doing, Pagnol did not hesitate to sap his film and inserted a title at the start of it to indicate the ruins of the village were built especially for the film : as if they were just a few sets for « canned theatre ».
Pagnol seemed afraid his talent had done too much justice to a competitor, whose philosophies he ultimately did not share and in whose world he did not feel at ease.
The playwright seemed to fear his work as a filmmaker would prove and reveal to his audience Giono was the greater writer of the two. Pagnol’s later publishing, under his own name, of the film script and dialogues, which partly prompted Giono to sue him, would be his way to appropriate, beyond the film, the literary work that founded it.
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