Le Curé de Cucugnan [TV] (1968)
Directed by Marcel Pagnol

Film Review

Thirteen years after he directed Les Lettres de mon Moulin (1954), the last film he made for the cinema, Marcel Pagnol took a break from his successful literary career to direct this short film, which was also taken from Alphonse Daudet's famous collection of short stories.  The film was made for French television and was broadcast in France on Christmas Day in 1968.  As engaging and humorous as the film is, it contains little of the visual flair of Pagnol's previous cinematic offerings and feels frustratingly confined and static.  For the most part, the camera is fixed on Fernand Sardou, who gives a rivetting performance as a parish priest who indulges in a naughty bit of subterfuge to bolster his church attendance numbers.  It's unashamedly a one man show in which Sardou shows off his talents as a raconteur and stand-up comedian.  Even though it was made over a decade after Pagnol's last film, Le Curé de Cucugnan fits almost seamlessly into his Les Lettres de mon Moulin and clearly belongs to a different era from the one in which it was made.  Dare we make a connection between the old priest appealing to his faithless congregation not to desert the church and the old filmmaker urging his audience not to turn their backs on cinema?

Film Synopsis

In the rural French village of Cucugnan, an old parish priest named Martin decides that desperate measures are called for if he is to avoid preaching to an empty church.  One day, he delivers a sermon in which he purports to recount a dream.  In his dream, Martin reveals that he visited both purgatory and Heaven, but found not one soul from Cucugnan.  Instead, every last inhabitant of the village ended up in the fiery furnace of Hell, a just retribution for their sinful lives...