Screen

...A farmland struggle follows—between man and man and man and nature—but often at a wooden pace, weighted with an air of fatality heavier than summer drought...

...As a theory, neorealism is relatively benign, and in the 1930s provided a helpful corrective to the rigidities of "pure" cinema of the Russian formalists and German expressionists, eager to dissociate film from any dependence on literature or theater...

...As evildoers, Yves Montand and Daniel Auteuil are credible, but lack complexity...

...Director George Miller (of the Mad Max opera) and screenwriter Michael Cristofer don't know what to make of all this...

...Mysteriously purchasing a luxury mansion (which has several conflicting, unresolved pasts in its closets), he satisfies their every amatory and gustatory whim...

...more often, all comic seriousness is exploded into that new sure-fire crowd pleaser, the adult cartoon (cf...

...Berri worked on Polanski's Tess, where Hardy pressed lessons like Zola's...

...The line is truly contemporary...

...In flashback he humors her through storytelling...

...After retiring from cinema, Pagnol wrote the novel L'eau des eollines, which director Claude Bern has tranformed into this film and one to come, Manon des Sources...

...Provence, he says, eyes rapt at its spring beauty, is ' 'the paradise of Zola'' —a line as subtle as serving iced tea at the bon voyage of the Titanic...

...T he Witches of Eastwick is here, Jack Nicolson is back...

...Ingemar must go to his uncle, who works there, when his mother becomes progressively more ill...

...Or maybe each other...

...they made a similarly beautiful, slow film...

...Weaving these threads, director Lasse Halstrom traces a network of psychological forces, weak only when he underplays the real suffering a child feels when he loses a parent...

...she is presented (again incoherently) as a Phyllis Schlafly type (with the proper WASP name of Felicia Alden), then killed off maliciously...

...Again he plays an enthusiast, equipped with far more brainpower than the bumpkins around him, allowing him to display his gifts as a passionate dreamer...

...But the laughs seem small potatoes, and, after drought, little rain...

...Her treatment passes beyond slapstick to what Nietzsche called the "festivity of cruelty...

...Gratuitous and digusting sadism is generated at the Cartwright character...

...in our imagination, how the mighty have fallen...

...He also gets comedy from malapropisms such as mistaking Depardieu's desire for "authentic farming" for a plan to raise '' othentics...

...Auteuil enriches the plot with traces of guilt over gulling Depardieu, who regards him as a best friend...

...How original...

...It stars, not character, but that recent Black Hole of American cinema, Industrial Light and Magic of San Mateo, California...

...The genius madcap...

...If so, we have something truly satanic on our hands...

...Some have compared Jean de Florette with Martin Guerre, that classic of rural, late medieval France...

...It stressed character, dialogue, and the illusion of reality from careful mise en scene...

...It suffers slightly from an ironic sentimentality familiar from recent European films like My Sweet Little Village...

...old Fransson, who works incessantly on his roof...

...The audience liked it...

...At times, it seemed there was genuine satiric potential in the screenplay...

...all we are left with is the plain vulgarity...

...I laughed, maybe, oh, say, four times...

...Some elements are comparable, especially scenes in which you experience the feel and texture of things, see the vivid colors and harsh light, and taste Provence's arid wind as salt on the tongue...

...But Depardieu is asked to play a role only half like his performance in Martin Guerre...

...My Life is flavored by some rustic scenes of Swedish village life in 1961, complete with colorful old wood barns and a grimy glassworks that provides the town's one industry...

...At times he pursues Berit, a buxom older blond who takes him along as a chaperone when she models a nude statue for the local sculptor (aptly, the work will be named'' Ur-Mother...

...In both the child's fantasies and some hilarious canine imitations, however, the film's title is fully explained and nicely fulfilled...

...he tells them how exploited they've been while exploiting them to the nth degree...

...His "scientific" plans are not only jeopardized by the soil, but neighborly greed...

...In human masquerade, You-Know-Who shows up, as if (unexplained) their wish were his desire...

...I suppose the media has made public cruelty a vogue...

...Jean de Florette is beautiful, rich, full, and flat...

...A slyer subtext involves Ingemar's search for a mother...

...Perhaps, considering what Jack Nicolson could have done with his career, it isn't just Satan who has done some falling...

...But the girls love his manliness, menus, and camp sense of play...

...How new...

...His proneness to creating disasters is as endearing as his wit in escaping their consequences...

...Neorealism at least had the merit of routing the cant of "pure" cinema to that most close-minded of institutions, the academy, where it remains a sign of the true devotees' intolerance of contamination by reality...

...He gets to meet a crew of country eccentrics: old Ardvisson, who has Ingemar read him lingerie catalogs...

...One other ingredient deserves comment and censure...

...But Depardieu now plays a fool, not a knave...

...In the film's middle, diverse ingredients of a well concocted, compound satire— on male chauvinism, on feminism, and on puritanism—simmer in an unsteady brew, only to be blown sky-high in the last half by Yet Another Apocalypse...

...It would be easy to dismiss the rest as a joke, if it weren't so bad...

...Against "the ruthless rejection of past genres" and other such modernist foamings at the mouth, neorealism preserved liberty of thought about film...

...Neorealism is better termed neonaturalism...

...Jean de Fhrette is the first of two films based on novels by the neorealist filmmaker, Marcel Pagnol...

...not just Mad Max bxxlGhostbujters,Legal Eagles, The Untouchables...

...Who cannot approve...

...The one and only, his cackle primed for manic wickedness, his devilish eyebrows raised in anticipation of naughty romps...

...at least he pulls off the trick in a story called "A & P." But the final hour here is a disaster...

...His pathetic vulnerability earns our sympathy, not our involvement...

...To be fair, Nicolson has a certain amount of bawdy energy...

...gone Marlowe's Mephistopheles and Goethe's super-sly master of irony...

...in the country, we see him work out his sense of loss while maturing from childhood to adolescence...

...He also plays with a tomboy caught in her own sexual conflict between wearing boxing gloves or floral dresses...

...How much range for an actor...

...Ingemar's love of his dog is treated with similar strengths and defects...

...indeed, some scenes of jolly bonhomie among rural folk could be xeroxes...

...and a grandfather who rigs up a play "spaceship" for the local children...

...The story concerns three lonely—one widowed, one deserted, one divorced—and beautiful women (Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer) and their longing for some exciting, perfect man to enter their lives...

...Gone are the heights of Miltonic sublime...

...Unholy cow...

...Bern has 420 updated neorealism as a tribute to Pagnol, but he creates a static, slow feel which many viewers will sense no ideology can excuse...

...Together, they garnered eight Cesar nominations...

...Still, as reaction, neorealism shares with "pure" cinema a common error, neglect of suspense...

...it gave power to writers or actors working in long takes, not editors or directors at montage...

...trouble only arises when another local woman— 421 indeed, one of the local "church ladies"—(Veronica Cartwright) smells a rat (how is yet another mystery...

...Oh, what a fall was there, my countrymen...

...Actually, Nicolson pegs himself better: he's "an average horny little devil" come to spook one of those clean-white-picket-fence-and-tall-Congregational-church-New-England-towns...

...Perhaps Updike, author of the source, was able to fuse the satire and slapstick with his deft, ambiguous word processor...

...We'd better all get in line right now just to show how hip, how rebellious, how nonconformist we are...

...gone even is the banality of Nazi evil in Karl Maria Brandeur's 1984Mephisto...

...Jack Nicolson as—Satan...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...The greying bad boy...

...But the sentiment of My Life is always kept in control by the acting of Anton Glanzelius as ten-year-old Ingemar—mischievous, imaginative, and resourceful in facing difficulties, especially his mother's tuberculosis...

...He's a hunchbacked city slicker who inherits a farm but aims too high with it...

...But the creative urge to challenge Hollywood never seems as strong, for the pseudo-Rebel, as the temptation to surrender the Self to It...

...The nostalgia here verges on the saccharine but evades it...

...its plot technique is not Balzac's but that of another author invoked early in Jean by the hopeful title character (Gerard Depardieu...

...They seem to be working at cross-purposes...