THE latest attempt on the part of jaded Paris sophisticates to glorify the life and values of people in the sticks is Marcel Pagnol’s slow-motion rural opus called “The Well-Digger’s Daughter.” This movie’s ancient story opens with a budlike blonde (Josette Day) clumping across a Renoiresque landscape, bringing her father (the late Raimu) his lunch. Though it is the most vacant sort of landscape, she bumps, as you expect, into her future lover (Georges Grey), standing like an ad for Jantzen bathing trunks in a stream that looks about one inch deep. Inevitable as this scene is, it is surprising to see such an expanse of nakedness, and a tall, plumpish mama’s boy, with the smile of a baby kitten, presented as the hero. He rapes her almost before she has inured herself to the pomade he uses on his hair, and then is unexpectedly called to the front. When the girl tells her father she is pregnant, they go to Greasy Hair’s wealthy parents to arrange the marriage; they are cast out; the father sends the girl away—and Hollywood never provided a patter ending. The movie is not only sophisticated comedy, but the profession of a faith in the peasant life of outdoor work, fierce self-respect and family love as the most profound way of living.
At least half of this suave job might have been done about twenty-five years ago; for the most part you feel that Pagnol could have done it with his eyes shut: there is a scene with an exploding, swaying 1910 jalopy which jolts down the road with groups of peasants standing around gaping the way people did in Mack Sennett comedies. Half the characters, including the well-digger and his burro-faced helper (Fernandel), are deep-dyed stereotypes; one curious aspect is that Raimu seems miscast and only half involved in his performance. The keyed-up, dynamic, cynical worldly nature he presents would go better in a movie like “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Still, the strength of the movie is largely due to Raimu, even though you feel that he is going through it automatically.
There are a few episodes that are surprisingly direct, candid and entirely new. There is a magical scene that combines the qualities of real naturalism and the poise and style of a Seurat landscape. It concerns a message the hero’s mother is supposed to deliver to the girl but decides not to at the last minute. Part of its beauty has to do with the setting—a cool country road, the classic movements of the people—and part of it with the fact of how definitely the director gets across each woman’s preoccupation with her own emotion. Almost as good is the candid aftermath of the rape scene, and then the girl’s sad confession of despairing degradation and her premonitions of love.
The movie seems too obviously contrived to fit the virtuosity of certain ace French players. The two whose acting is least mannered are Charpin and Line Noro, who play the boy’s parents, and these are some exciting secondary characters: the talkative, Boweryish waiter and the vase-like aunt. The photography and settings are a kind that are now second nature to Pagnol—gauzy, sun-drenched scenes, like Degas pastels, of people laundering, walking through the fields and handling babies.
November 4, 1946