Manon des Sources (1986 film)

Manon des Sources
Directed by	Claude Berri
Produced by	Pierre Grunstein Alain Poiré
Written by	Claude Berri Gérard Brach
Starring	Yves Montand Daniel Auteuil Emmanuelle Béart Hippolyte Girardot
Music by	Jean-Claude Petit [1]
Cinematography	Bruno Nuytten
Editing by	Hervé de Luze Geneviève Louveau
Distributed by	Pathé Distribution (EU) Orion Classics (USA)
Release date(s)	November 19, 1986 (1986-11-19)
Running time	113 minutes
Country	Italy France Switzerland
Language	French
Box office	56.4 million €

Manon des Sources (French pronunciation: [manɔ̃ de suʁs]; released in North America as Manon of the Spring) is a critically acclaimed and commercially successful 1986 French language film. Based upon the 1966 two-part novel by Marcel Pagnol, itself an adaptation of an earlier film of the same title by Pagnol, it is the sequel to Jean de Florette.

Plot

Following the events of Jean de Florette, Manon, the daughter of Jean, is living in the countryside of Provence near Les Romarins, the farm that her father once owned. She has taken up residence with an elderly Piedmontese squatter couple who teach her to live off the land, tending to a herd of goats and hunting for birds and rabbits. Ugolin Soubeyran has begun a successful business growing carnations at Les Romarins with his uncle, César Soubeyran—also known as Papet—thanks to the water provided by the spring there.

After seeing her bathe nude in the mountains, Ugolin develops an interest in Manon. When he ultimately approaches her, she seems disgusted by his vileness and almost certainly by the memory of his involvement in her father's downfall. But Ugolin's interest in Manon soon becomes obsessive, culminating in sewing a ribbon from her hair onto his chest. At the same time, Manon becomes interested in Bernard, a handsome and educated schoolteacher who had recently arrived in the village. As a small child, Manon had seen César and Ugolin unblock a spring they had hidden from her father, who died from a blow to the head while using explosives in an attempt to find the water source. César and Ugolin had then bought the farm cheaply from his widow—Manon's mother—and unblocked the spring. Thus they profited directly from his death. When she overhears two villagers talking about it, she realises that many in the village knew of the crime but had remained silent, for the Soubeyran family was locally important. While searching for a goat that fell into a crevice above the village, Manon finds the underground source of the spring that supplies water to the local farms and village. She stops the flow of water using the iron-oxide clay and rocks found nearby to take her revenge on both the Soubeyrans and the villagers, who knew but did nothing.

The villagers quickly become desperate for water to feed their crops and run their businesses, and they progressively come to believe that the water flow had been stopped by some untellable Providence to punish the injustice committed against Jean. Manon publicly accuses César and Ugolin, and the villagers progressively admit their own complicity in the persecution of Jean, whom they never accepted and who they felt was unworthy of their trust because he was an outsider and was physically deformed. César tries to explain away his actions but an eye-witness, a poacher who was trespassing on the vacant property at the time, steps forward to confirm the crime, shaming both César and Ugolin. Ugolin makes a desperate attempt to ask Manon for her hand in marriage, but the hate in her eyes is clear and the Soubeyrans are forced to flee in disgrace. Rejected by Manon, Ugolin commits suicide by hanging himself from a tree, thus apparently ending the Soubeyran line.

The villagers appeal to Manon to take part in a religious procession to the village's fountain, hoping that acknowledging the injustice will restore the flow of water to the village once more. With the assistance of Bernard, Manon unblocks the spring in advance, and the water arrives at the village at the very moment that the procession reaches the fountain. Manon marries the schoolteacher, Bernard. She is last seen pregnant and leaving a church service on Christmas Eve with her husband, having presumably gone into labor.

Meanwhile, the loss of Ugolin has made César a broken man. Delphine, an old acquaintance of his, returns to the village and tells him that Florette, his then sweetheart, had written to him to tell him she was carrying their child, a child she later tried to abort with potions and self-injury when she received no reply from César. Florette later left the village, married a blacksmith from nearby Créspin, and the child was born alive but a hunchback. César, away on military service in Africa, never received her letter and never knew that Florette had given birth to his child. In a cruel twist of fate, Jean, the man he drove to desperation without ever meeting him, was the son he had always wanted. Devastated, and lacking the will to live any longer, César dies quietly in his sleep. In a letter he leaves his property to his granddaughter Manon, as the last of the Soubeyrans.

Cast

• Emmanuelle Béart as Manon
• Yves Montand as César Soubeyran/'Le Papet'
• Daniel Auteuil as Ugolin
• Hippolyte Girardot as Bernard Olivier
• Margarita Lozano as Baptistine
• Yvonne Gamy as Delphine
• Gabriel Bacquier and Eve Brenner as singers at the wedding

Awards

• César Award for Best Actor - Daniel Auteuil, 1987
• César Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role – Emmanuelle Béart, 1987

References

1. ^ The score "borrows liberally" from Verdi's 1862 opera La forza del destino, in particular, the aria “Invano Alvaro”. See : http://www.reelviews.net/movies/j/jean_de_florette.html

External links

• Manon des Sources at the Internet Movie Database
• Manon des Sources at AllRovi