Regain (1937)
Directed by Marcel Pagnol

Film Review

Immediately after completing his famous Marseille Trilogy with César (1936), director Marcel Pagnol embarked on another series of Provençal dramas, beginning with Regain (a.k.a. Harvest), based on a novel of the same title by Jean Giono.  Pagnol had already adapted two of Giono's books - Jofroi (1933) and Angèle (1934) - and was the ideal director to bring Giono's world to the big screen, as both men shared the same intense love of Provence and were equally keen observers of human nature.  Of all the films he made, Regain is arguably the one in which Pagnol's affinity for Provençal life is most keenly felt - the film is nothing less than a love poem to what he believed was the most beautiful region of France, shot entirely on location at the time of year when Provence is at its most enchanting.

Regain also has the distinction of having the strongest cast of any of Pagnol's films.  Fernandel, now well on his way to being one of France's biggest stars, is perfectly cast in what it is quite possibly his best dramatic role of the 1930s, a darker variation on the naive but amiable simpleton that he played so well.  (To persuade Fernandel to accept the role, Pagnol was forced to offer him the lead in the film he made in parallel with Regain, Le Schpountz.)  Pagnol's muse and companion Orane Demazis was equally well-matched for the lead female role of Arsule, a near-relation of the character that the actress had portrayed with such startling naturalism in the director's earlier film Angèle.  For the central male role, Pagnol was fortunate to secure the services of one of the finest stage and screen actors of the era, Gabriel Gabrio, who had previously excelled as Jean Valjean in Henri Fescourt's 1925 version of Les Misérables.  With a supporting cast that includes Marguerite Moreno and Robert Le Vigan, in addition to Pagnol's familiar troupe of superb character actors (Henri Poupon, Édouard Delmont, Charles Blavette), Regain can hardly help being a cut above the director's usual output.  The stark authenticity of the performances is helped by a script that is easily one of Pagnol's best.

It is not only the performances in Regain that impress; the photography contributes much to the film's charm and realism.  A fair criticism of Pagnol's early films is that they are aggressively static, little more than stage plays shot al fresco.  In Regain, the setting isn't just a pretty backdrop; it becomes part of the story, evoking the powerful natural forces that shape and control our destinies.  Here, the camera roves with far more freedom than in most of Pagnol's films, drifting lazily across the sunny Provençal landscape much as Pagnol himself might have done in his recreational hours.  The characters in the film are so fully integrated with their environment that we just cannot imagine them in any other setting.  Édouard Delmont's Gaubert (the oldster whose defection to the town begins the film), is so out of place in his new home that he tragically resembles a plant that has been violently uprooted and tossed onto the roadside, to wither and die.  By contrast, Arsule comes to life as soon as she sets foot in Pagnol country, thriving and blossoming like a plant that suddenly finds itself in fertile soil.

Had Regain been made just a few years later, during the dark years of the Nazi occupation, it would doubtless have found favour with the Pétainists, extolling as it does the virtues of a cohesive community and a life of hard work for modest rewards.  In fact, the film was made before the war, at a time of renewed optimism in France, when the election of the Popular Front government brought the promise of a new dawn, a workers' Utopia.  The final sequence, in which Panturle and Arsule are seen happily sowing their wheat seeds in eager anticipation of the harvest to come, captures the mood of the moment perfectly.  For a few brief months it must have seemed that the Utopian dream had become a reality - and then it all fell apart.  The darker tone of Pagnol's next two dramas, La Femme du boulanger (1938) and La Fille du puisatier (1940), has an unmistakable hint of Paradise Lost about it.  The grain that had been planted with such optimism would yield a very bitter harvest indeed.

Film Synopsis

One by one, the inhabitants of a remote little village in Haute-Provence depart, until only the poacher Panturle remains.  He dreams of finding a wife and bringing the village back to life.  One day, the village is visited by the travelling knife-grinder Gédémus and his companion, a young woman named Arsule, whom he treats as a slave.  Having saved Panturle from drowning in a river, Gédémus is surprised when, the next morning, he and Arsule go missing.  Thinking that Arsule may have been murdered, he heads off to the nearest police station, not knowing that Arsule has accompanied Panturle back to his home of her own volition.  When an elderly former resident of the village gives him his treasured ploughshare so that he can begin harvesting wheat, Panturle sees that he can at last realise his dream...