Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

paid in full Very few movies make you feel good all the way through. This movie is not an action movie and yet...it keeps you engaged. It never has a dull moment. All the characters play their part to perfection. Truly, this is a gem.

Draco2-0 I just watched Jean De Florrete and it was great, very rare for me to say this but I was not once bored or restless during the entire movie. Jean De Florrete, about this French farmer who moves onto his uncle's land and decides it would be profitable to grow flowers. But in order to grow a enough flowers to make a profit they'll need more water than they have available. Their neighbor has an untapped underground spring. The farmer and his uncle go over to negotiate buying the land with the spring on it. Unfortunately for them their neighbor hates the uncle, and when they offer to buy some of his land the uncle and him get into a fight and during the bustle his head suffers a fatal blow against a rock and he dies almost instantaneously. The whole ordeal took place by a tree, so the farmer and his uncle make it look like the old man fell from the tree and hit his head. They think the land will be theirs but a relative of the neighbor, a hunchback, moves onto the property. The uncle offers to buy the land from him but the hunchback wants to use it for raising rabbits and growing squash. Fascinating to watch the triumphs and failures of the hunchback as he goes about trying to fulfill his dream, always with a happy upbeat attitude. The thing that amazed me about the movie would be just how simple the actual plot feels. There are no huge twists, no distracting sub-plots, not much happens for most of the movie until the last 15 minutes; despite that it manages to grab the viewers attention wonderfully and it doesn't let it go until the credits roll either. Unless you hate French movies. I highly recommend Jean De Floret.

runamokprods Two part film, that was 1st released as two separate features. Terrific telling of a complex story of intertwined farming families in rural France in the early part of the 20th century. The acting is mostly of the highest order. Yves Montand, one of the most suave men in history is completely believable as a rough hewn, self-centered farmer, Gerard Depardieu, also cast against type, as a gentle, educated city born man trying to make it as a farmer also is astounding. Almost as good is Daniel Auteuil as Montand's not-very-bright son. Only Emmanuelle Beart, gorgeous though she may be, doesn't quite convince me as the wild woman of the fields. Some of it is performance, some of it is how perfect she looks. The story is wonderful in a Dickensian sort of way, with clues and character elements showing up early, only to pay off three hours later. I love the first part even more, somehow it feels more truly tragic and dense, the 2nd part just a bit too neat by the end. But still a grand, intelligent, great looking entertainment.

zjerunk I have many favorites, and this is one of the crème de la crème. This is a visually stunning film more like beautiful photographic montage. It is simple, tragic story well told, unlike many of today's plots - implausibly lame, suffering on a CGI crutch for 85 minutes. The simple story is about enduring truths which have been the mainstay of the Greek classics and Shakespeare: Our human strengths, our failings, our virtues, and our vices. The story may be a fiction, but its kernel is not. It is stories and story telling like this which has kept our rapt attention for four thousand years.First we should understand that this film is only the first half the novel by Marcel Pagnol which would have been too long as a single film, and out of necessity, was shot as two. The second half is titled, Manon of the Spring. Neither film stands alone as satisfactory because, obviously, it would be incomplete, and naturally, is also important that the two halves be viewed in sequence. For a fairly dispassionate précis of the plots, I suggest reading the ones on Wikipedia, so I won't be repetitive here. I also recommend reading the boards for comments and discussions.JdF & MotS were both shot at the same time in 1986 with a budget of $17 million making it/them the biggest budget French films up to that time. JdF grossed $86M worldwide, and of that sum, only $4.9M was from the USA. MotS grossed $56M worldwide, of which only $3.9M was from the USA. In other words, culture films are not a good fit for the American viewing audience, and the gross revenue numbers bear this out. The rest of the world seems to bear out this conclusion.Foreign language films rarely do well in the USA for the simple reason that the vast majority of the viewing audience are unilingual anglophones who do not wish to burden themselves with having to work at "understanding" their entertainment - they wish to merely consume it. If it requires the work of reading subtitles or thought, it becomes unpalatable. This film requires your attention and thought!But to be fair to the US viewers, the subtitles are at times incomplete or inaccurate, and unlike the spoken word, they do not convey the emphasis or importance of certain bits of dialogue well. The plot is woven steadily throughout the film, so the viewers with no understanding at all of the French language are missing essential dialogue, and therefore plot.The bottom line is this: You will either be entranced by these two films and love them, or you will be bored by the first 15 minutes, and you'll translate that into "bad film." If your highest quality level of reading is Marvel comics then I suggest you stay away from this one.However, I recall years ago walking into a video store where this was playing on all the monitors. All the patrons in the store, ranging in age from 5 to 75 years, were standing transfixed watching this film. There was something magical about it!