The Irrepressible Rothbard

December 1992

One movie in two parts, directed by Yves Robert.
French, with subtitles

Since World War II, with only a few exceptions (usually the films of Eric Rohmer), French cinema has been, for all of us cultural reactionaries, abominable. Almost to a movie, they have been absurdist, snail’s-paced, static, camera lingering lovingly on the pores of the faces of the main actors, plotless, dialog-less, morbid, and irrational. In short, aesthetically and politically leftist and avant-garde.

And yet it was not always thus. French movies before World War II were often splendid: rich, buoyant, funny, worldly-wise, and many of them were the marvelous comedies of the French playwright and moviemaker, Marcel Pagnol. The wonderful trilogy, Marius, Fanny, and Cesar, and The Baker’s Wife, all featuring the incomparable character actor Raimu, were justly celebrated as some of the best movies ever made.

The late Pagnol is now, happily, very much back with us in spirit, in these two superb gems (they have to be seen in the above order), based on the memoirs that Pagnol published shortly before his death. The movies are brought to us, in a wonderful tribute to Pagnol, by his old friend and movie director Yves Robert. The movies are remarkably evocative of Pagnol’s childhood in turn-of-the-century southern France. His father was a schoolteacher in Marseilles, and the family would take the traditional French August vacation in the hills of Provence. At first the family rented the house, and then bought it, and the two films portray young Pagnol growing up, and learning about and falling in love with the Provencal hill country.

And what a childhood it was! The increasingly common modern view is to heap abuse on one’s parents for (a) psychologically messing you up, and being responsible for all your ills; and (b) for being part and parcel of hateful, insensitive, cloddish, comfortable, upper-middle-class bourgeois life. Much of modern culture consists of dumping on the bourgeoisie, on one’s own parents, relatives, neighbors, etc. as being guilty of exploitation of the poor as well as of psychological destruction of the author.

This Pagnol–Robert film is produced as if in defiance of modern convention. For it is, mirabile dictu, a portrayal of a very happy childhood, a childhood, as Mencken once wrote of his own, “encapsulated in love,” Pagnol loves and admires his father, his mother, and even his wealthy reactionary, Catholic uncle, who, in a more trendy film, would be set up as the villain of the piece, but is actually a fine and admirable person. Pagnol’s memoirs are a portrayal of a wonderful lost world: a paean to the bourgeois world of pre-World War I France. And the Provencal hills are so rhapsodically displayed that even I, an inveterate urbanite, felt a tug of empathy.

It must be pointed out: none of this is gushing or overly sentimental, in the cornball Hollywood tradition. The conclusion emerges out of a simple, underplayed story line. The photography is superb yet unobtrusive. And it’s not as if there were no problems in Marcel’s growing up. They were not major, but they are handled with great charm, insight, and affectionate wit. His finding a country friend, learning about nature, his losing his heart to a young vixen and potential dominatrix, are all the more effective for being underplayed and done with a light hand. So lulled are we into an elegiac mood, that the heartbreaking end of the second film, My Mother’s Castle, brings the two-movie set to a powerful two-handkerchief climax.

Many of the reviewers of these movies, arrogant in their trendy negative view of the world, claim that Pagnol could not actually be right, that he must be “repressing,” that his childhood simply couldn’t have been that happy. Rubbish! See these two movies and find yourself back in a world where a happy bourgeois family life was possible: where it happened; and where artists had the simple honesty to defy nihilist convention and proclaim this happy fact to themselves and to the world. And as long as such artists, and such movies, exist, we too can be happy in the knowledge that someday this kind of world can be recovered from memory and nostalgia, and become part of our present and future reality. Some day, when the poisoners of our culture have been sent packing, and our world can be green again.