Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 26, 2015

Despite rather august achievements in a variety of media, Marcel Pagnol is strangely unremembered or at least underappreciated today. A number of Pagnol’s novels like La Gloire de mon père and Le château de ma mère have been acclaimed as undisputed masterpieces, while his trilogy of plays located in the evocative port of Marseilles provided the source material for the Broadway musical Fanny (the show that gave future Carol Brady, Florence Henderson, one of her first big breaks), which in turn became the largely nonmusical film Fanny in 1961 (and later a remake by Daniel Auteuil). Pagnol’s translations of Shakespeare into French are still considered among the best ever done, even if some occasionally criticize them for being quirky. But Pagnol was also a filmmaker, and while his oeuvre doesn’t rise to the heights of his contemporaries Jean Renoir or Jean Cocteau, Pagnol created some inarguably memorable characters and stories in this medium as well. He in fact filmed all three parts of his Marseilles triptych, with Fanny and Marius appearing in 1931, followed five years later by César. In 1952 Pagnol got into skirmishes with his distributor over his four hour opus Manon des Sources, and the film was radically cut against its creator’s wishes. Though it took him about a decade after that debacle to recast his vision in a new medium, in 1963 Pagnol brought out his two part novel L'Eau des Collines, a convoluted, almost Edna Ferber-esque multigenerational saga that detailed the exploits of a scheming Provençal family whose plans to start growing carnations (carnations!) on an arid field shortly after World War I brings them into conflict with a neighbor whose property contains a supposedly secret spring. In 1986, Claude Berri filmed both parts of L’Eau des Collines simultaneously, releasing the films separately as Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, which became Manon of the Spring in its English iteration.

For complete coverage of the two films included in this two disc set, please click on the following review links:

Jean de Florette Blu-ray review

Manon of the Spring Blu-ray review

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Video quality for each release is addressed in the individual reviews, linked above.

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Audio quality for each release is addressed in the individual reviews, linked above.

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Supplementary material for each release is detailed in the individual reviews, linked above.

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Despite running around four hours when taken as a whole, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring offer one of the most tightly constructed stories imaginable, one which unspools with an inexorable quality reminiscent of Greek tragedy. Filled with unforgettable characters (both good and evil) as well as some of the most incredibly ravishing scenery imaginable, these two films are impeccably involving and ultimately surprisingly effective. While supplementary material is sadly lacking here, Shout! has done a good job by providing each film on a separate BD-50 disc, with solid bitrates (rarely falling below the mid-30 Mbps range), with the result being a generally nice reproduction of the originals' sun dappled, gauzily gorgeous ambience. Highly recommended.