Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri, 1986)

There's no good reason why Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring should have been two films rather than one. They were shot together over the course of seven months, but released separately, Manon following Jean after about three months. Shown together as one film, they would total some 230 minutes -- only a bit longer than Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) at 212 minutes or Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) at 222 minutes. But the length of those films seems consistent with their epic pretensions, whereas Jean/Manon together amount to a domestic melodrama -- an entertaining one, with a beautiful Provençal setting, but far from an epic. Their separate releases feel a bit like a con -- as in economics. Films of that blockbuster length are a drag on the exhibitor, who must schedule fewer showings per day, so it probably made sense to release Jean, which unabashedly announces at the end that it's "part one," to whet an appetite for Manon, whose posters announced it as the second part of Jean de Florette. Voilà! double the box office take. In fact, Manon of the Spring had been filmed before, by Marcel Pagnol in 1952, and it had been a long film, as much as four hours, before being cut by the distributor. Pagnol was so upset by this experience that he turned the screenplay into a novel, L'Eau des Collines, adding the story of Manon's father, Jean, which had been only a backstory in his film. And it's this novel that Claude Berri decided to adapt into his two films. The problem I see, having just watched Berri's films back to back, is that there's not quite enough material for two. Jean de Florette is an overextended prequel, introducing the characters of César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil), and their villainous attempt to cut off the water supply to Jean (Gérard Depardieu), the newcomer who inherits the estate they covet. Or perhaps Manon of the Spring is a thinly developed sequel, in which Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), avenges her father. If Jean had been trimmed of some of the scenes of Jean raising rabbits and Manon of some of the shots of Manon gamboling with her goats in the hills -- as well as the romantic subplot involving the new village schoolteacher (Hippolyte Girardot) -- both stories could have fitted nicely into one movie. Manon climaxes with a scene in which César learns an uncomfortable truth about Jean's parentage, but Berri and co-screenwriter Gérard Brach drag the film out after that revelation, which should have been left to make its impact. Still, Berri's films have much to recommend them, especially the performances of Montand, Auteuil, and Depardieu (the last is sorely missed in the second film) and the beautiful cinematography of Bruno Nuytten. Jean-Claude Petit's score makes good use of themes from the overture to Giuseppe Verdi's La Forza del Destino.  

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007)

The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956) is a short film that won the Oscar for best original screenplay, even though it's only a little over half an hour long and has only a few lines of spoken dialogue. In it, a boy (writer-director Lamorisse's young son, Pascal) on his way to school finds a large red balloon that has become caught in a lamppost. He soon discovers that he can't take the balloon with him on a bus or into his school, but the balloon is waiting for him after classes. He's also forbidden to bring the balloon into his home, but it floats up to his bedroom window and he lets it in. Over the next couple of days, the balloon tags along, sometimes getting the boy into trouble, until it's finally punctured by a rock fired from another boy's slingshot and slowly dies. Whereupon balloons from all over Paris flock to the boy, who gathers them and floats away over the rooftops. It's a small charmer, with ravishing views of 1950s Paris by cinematographer Edmond Séchan. The balloon becomes emblematic of childhood innocence in conflict with the daily grind of adulthood, which is why I think it still strikes a chord with audiences and, in the case of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, inspired an hommage: The Voyage of the Red Balloon. Hou's film, which he co-wrote with François Margolin, is nearly four times the length of Lamorisse's and doesn't have such a neatly symbolic resolution. In it, a boy, Simon (Simon Iteanu), lives with his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), in a cramped Paris apartment. Suzanne is a puppeteer -- a profession that links her with childhood -- who hires a Chinese film student, Song (Fang Song), as a part-time nanny for Simon. Song is working on her own homage to The Red Balloon, and we see bits of it as she poses Simon with a balloon and films it floating around the city. But much of Hou's film deals with the domestic turmoil that surrounds Simon as Suzanne, a divorcee, tries to cope with juggling career and household problems. She leases part of the building to Marc (Hippolyte Girardot), who has been stiffing her on the rent and tends to pop into her apartment at odd times to use her kitchen and leave it a mess. She is trying to evict him so she'll have a place for her daughter, who lives with Suzanne's ex-husband in Brussels, to stay when she comes to Paris in the summer. Simon patiently endures his mother's frazzled nerves and finds a companion in Song, who quietly manages to bring a little order into the household. By film's end, nothing is really resolved in their lives, but a red balloon peeps into the apartment windows and floats above the skylight over Simon's bed, as if childhood has persisted for the time being against all the assaults against it. It's a poetic, meditative kind of film that gains its strength from immersing us into the lives of others. It seems to me to stretch out a little longer than it should, but it features another terrific performance by Binoche.