Manon des Sources

I think one of the things that makes tragedy particularly effective on the audience is its predictability. We can see things that the characters cannot because we are standing outside the situation looking in instead of standing within the situation and looking out. We see each character’s flaws clearly in contrast with the events of the story so that we can predict the story’s ending in ways that the characters cannot.

Manon des Sources ends up working particularly well because we saw the backstory in Jean de Florette. This would be like pairing Oedipus Rex with a prequel of sorts that dramatized the king’s murder of his father. Oedipus Rex is great on its own, but the experience would be enhanced, I believe, by actually seeing the events that led to Oedipus’s rise (planting the seeds of his fall) dramatically instead of hearing it described by the characters.

We don’t have that handicap in Manon, though. We saw Jean, his humpback, his earnest plans, and Papet and Ugolin’s destruction of Jean. We saw the happy family life of little Manon fall apart first hand, so we can understand the anger within her more fully. We can feel for her. When she takes out her anger on the entirety of the town, we’re much more on her side than we might otherwise be. We share in her anger, and many of the audience not only feel her justified to do something as poetic as shutting off the town’s water supply after they had sat by quietly and watched Papet and Ugolin shut off her father’s supply.

There’s a later revelation around Papet. About three and a half hours into this two-part movie we get an important piece of background that even he didn’t know. The only person who knew this piece was a character we had never seen before, a blind old townswoman. It’s appearance is appropriate, but it also creates a certain amount of sympathy for our antagonist in his deepest moments of despair.

This is the better half of the whole story, but it couldn’t exist without the first. I kind of hate how the movie ended up separate instead of being a single 4-hour movie. There’s obviously a clean break in the narrative (and in time) between the two, but they can’t really exist independently. Distribution companies for home video releases have bridged this gap by releasing both films on the same disc, but I think I’ll approach this whole work as I do The Lord of the Rings. The two halves were filmed at the same time by the same people and released very closely apart while telling a cohesive story from one to the next. It is one film.

Netflix Rating: 5/5

Quality Rating: 4/4