28 November 2020

Daniel Auteuil's La Fille du puisatier (2011)

This is a fairy story, the flipside of Frédéric Mistral's tragic Mireille, and a remake of Marcel Pagnol's film of the same name starring Raimu and Fernandel (which I've not seen). The prince is Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a guy born into wealth, and the princess is Patricia Amoretti (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), the well digger's daughter.

This is set slightly before World War II breaks out, Patricia is pregnant with no hope of marrying the future father, the parents of Jacques won't entertain the thought of their son Jacques being the father, and anyway he's gone off to fight and is soon killed. Meanwhile, Patricia's father has to disown her because of the shame of having an 'illegitimate' child in the family. (We'll forget the sub-plot of Félipe (Kad Merad) wanting to marry Patricia so as not to complicate things.)

Anyway, Jacques comes back from the dead and wants to marry Patricia, which will be done as soon as possible, Jacque's parents are very pleased to be grandparents, and all things are resolved: a real fairy story with a happy end. The Mazel parents live in Salon, although I thought it a rather long way for Patricia (from a neighbouring hamlet) to go to Meet Jacques (before he went to war), but then this was called 'La Chapelle Saint Julien' so made out to be somewhere else, although the chapel shown in the still below is in fact the Chapelle Saint Sixte in Egalières, as shown on the cover of Maurice Pezet's book Egalières-en-Provence (1970):


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