My Father's Glory
Among the bounteous literary and cinematic legacy ofMarcel Pagnol, poet laureate of Provence, is a two-volume memoir,My Father's GloryandMy Mother's Castle. The enormous success ofJean de FloretteandManon of the Spring(Claude Berri's 1986 remakes of two Pagnol films from the '50s) encouraged Yves Robert to shoot another Pagnol diptych. Like Garlaban, the great bluff overhanging Pagnol's childhood home, the result is "less than a mountain, much more than a hill." The first part,My Father's Glory, spans Marcel's early years from infancy to preteen. The film keeps faith with its juvenile subject, leaping from one quirky detail of landscape, character, or biography to the next--whatever has caught the child's fancy and lingered in the adult narrator's memory. This makes for episodic storytelling, but it's an appropriate way to reflect childhood experience, and it doesn't prevent Robert from developing loving portraits of Pagnol's nearest and dearest, or paying luminous tribute to the Provençal countryside Pagnol loved. You can almost feel the sunshine, smell the wild thyme.--Richard T. Jameson