Monday 9 May 2022

Sunday Is Here Again,

I do not know where the time goes,


'Cheers!', with a sherry and a read,

Diana bought some sweetcorn and made a sweetcorn, onion and garlic soup, which was delicious,

for our main course, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding,

sans gravy for myself,

Diana all smiles as usual,

for dessert a sherry trifle,

eyes down and tuck in, after listening to some music,

it was feet up for Jean de Florette, a French film with English subtitles, forget about special effects or camera wizardry, this is a film set rural France, I have copied this from the IMDB page as I could not have told  the story better,

'in a rural French village an old man and his only remaining relative cast their covetous eyes on an adjoining vacant property. They need its spring water for growing their flowers, so are dismayed to hear the man who has inherited it is moving in. They block up the spring and watch as their new neighbour tries to keep his crops watered from wells far afield through the hot summer. Though they see his desperate efforts are breaking his health and his wife and daughter's hearts they think only of getting the water',

this is the first part of a 1966 two-volume novel by Marcel Pagnol we followed that with the second part, Manon des Sources, the acting, story and camera work in Jean de Florette was first class, a real joy to watch, the second half, Manon des Sources, when the daughter of Jean returns was just as good, both films are drawn from the same source: Filmmaker/novelist Marcel Pagnol's 1952 rural romance, the first DVD titled Jean de Florette taking up the story Manon (Emmanuelle Beart), now fully grown, is a shepherdess who prefers to keep her distance from the local villagers, She is determined to uncover the truth behind the death of her father (played by Gerard Depardieu in Jean de Florette) and to wreak vengeance on the men she holds responsible, the more sympathetic of the two men, Ugolin (Daniel Auteil), is in love with Manon, (in real life Daniel fell for Emmanuelle and had a ten-year relationship with her that produced a daughter, born in 1992), but this does not weaken her resolve, She causes the village's water supply to diminish, blaming this action upon Ugolin and his duplicitous co-conspirator Cesar (Yves Montand), the upshot of this vengeful behaviour ends in tragedy for all concerned, beautifully filmed and told, a bitter sweet, so sad story of rural France, we both thoroughly enjoyed watching both the stories unfold, we first watched the films back in 2013, and would highly recommend both of them, in the evening we watched a couple from Silent Witness before we were off to bed.


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