Claude Berri Collection

Originally an actor, Claude Berri began directing in the early 1960s. He was best known for acute social comedies like Le Sex Shop (1973) before he founded his own pro... more >

Originally an actor, Claude Berri began directing in the early 1960s. He was best known for acute social comedies like Le Sex Shop (1973) before he founded his own production and distribution companies and emerged as one of the most powerful figures in French cinema, sponsoring pictures from both the mainstream and auteur traditions. This penchant for the populist and the profound eventually came to inform his own films, which did much to revive the costume drama that had remained largely out of favour since its savaging by the iconoclasts of the New Wave.

Adapted from Marcel Pagnol's novel, The Water in the Hills, Jean de Florette (1986) is a cinematic tour de force boasting superb performances by Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil as the scheming Provencal farmers intent on driving newly arrived hunchback Gérard Depardieu off his land. Avoiding the chocolate box visuals that too often romanticised British heritage pictures, cinematographer Bruno Nuytten helped Berri establish the pace of life and the beauty of the changing seasons. But while the photography is even more atmospheric in the sequel, Manon des Sources (1986), Berri errs towards melodrama, as Auteuil attempts to atone for the wrong done to Emmanuelle Béart and her family.

Some levelled similar accusations of pictorialism at Berri's 1993 adaptation of Emile Zola's Germinal. But the 1860s mining village created for the film is imposingly authentic and Gérard Depardieu's towering performance gives heart to this sombre study of exploitative capitalism and stoic labour.

Berri captured a similarly tangible sense of repression and resistance in Lucie Aubrac (1997), in which Carole Bouquet seeks to rescue Maquis husband Daniel Auteuil from a Gestapo prison.

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DVD Extras

• 4 discs.

Film Details

Cast

Miou-Miou, Carole Bouquet, Daniel Auteuil, Emmanuelle Beart, Gerard Depardieu, Yves Montand

Technical Details