Marius and Fanny originated as plays. Cesar was written directly for the screen. All three are populated by the same little community in Marseille's old port. Each takes its name from the character making each installment's pivotal decision. Marius (Pierre Fresnay) is a restless Marseillais who puts the stability of the intertwined families and characters at risk by deciding to go to sea (it's impossible to not see in him the young Pagnol, straining to break out of Marseille). In the trilogy's second panel, it's Orane Demazis's shellfish vendor, Fanny, who makes the decision not to tell Marius he impregnated her because she doesn't want him to stick around feeling shackled and resentful. Again, acting on her own, she opts to avoid disgrace and give the baby a name by accepting a long-standing offer of marriage to a much older well-to-do widower sailmaker, Fernand Charpin's Panisse. Knowing the facts (Fanny, a woman of integrity, makes sure he does), Panisse large-heartedly embraces mother and child. Having always wanted his own offspring, he touchingly adds "& FILS" to the sign above his door. During a brief stop home, Marius visits Fanny. But as their passion briefly reignites, Marius's father, Cesar, intervenes, and the point is made that the baby's real father is the one who loves the child, not the one who sired it.
Soap opera, perhaps, but not in the hands of Pagnol, Allegret and the leads who originated the roles on stage, especially the great character actor, Raimu, whose performance as the blustery but soft-hearted Cesar was the big reason, Pagnol was to write, that Parisian audiences fell in love with both plays. In the concluding segment, which takes place years later, Cesar's decision to pass the waterfront bar he had hoped to leave Marius to his now-grown grandson brings the trilogy full circle. Raimu's Cesar puts up a gruff front, dispensing stentorian banter from behind the bar to the play's Greek chorus of regulars, including Panisse. Cesar won't acknowledge his emotions to them. But he opens up to Fanny about his suffering at the long wait between letters from his son, and doesn't bother to hide from her his pathetic eagerness for the tiniest scrap of news of him. So vividly does he loom over the others, so deep was his imprint on the French national consciousness, that France named its equivalent of the Oscar® after Cesar.
Fanny is brimful of the qualities that distinguish Pagnol's best work and make it enduringly beloved. It's a simple story of simple people driven by primal emotions, upfront about them, but expressing them with great delicacy as the film's little family unit about to be configured one way is broken up and reconfigured along new, more complicated lines. Totally absent is the usual contempt of opera bouffe and farce for the old fogey with his eye on a young wife. Charpin plays Panisse's benevolence with becoming modesty and is rewarded by having it acknowledged with a warm salute. Far from being cuckolded, the usual fate awaiting older husbands of much younger wives, he's treated with respect and even affection.
In fact, the trilogy's appeal is bookended by the two old men Cesar and the soft, balding, unprepossessing Panisse. He's treated much better now than when they all were boys growing up together. He recalls what a bully the bigger Cesar could be. Humor is never long absent. In Marius, Fanny finally sleeps with Marius, but not before a long tirade about him going off to sea. Yet Fanny, like the entire trilogy, is about reconciliation, not destruction. The characters keenly want things, but aren't out to break society's rules, or even break with convention. Although Pagnol caused a bit of eyebrow-raising with his elastic views on sex and parentage, audiences, like the neighborhood the characters live in, were practical and worldly, with their values and sensibilities genuflected to. Pagnol turns decency into a simpatico thing, never prissy, sanctimonious, cloying, or an abject surrender to morality. Everyone improvises as best they can to arrive at an outcome all can live with. They behave well under the circumstances, often with impressive politeness.
Although Pagnol (1895-1974) jumped into heated debates about the esthetics of film versus stage, he wisely left the shooting of Fanny to Allegret. Never straining to conceal its stage origins, Fanny nevertheless opens up in a quite unforced manner, with moments of unexpected visual modernity. If most of it consists of people in rooms talking, Allegret's smart cutting between them and his maximum use of outdoor sequences make the film quite fluid and cinematic. In the opening moments, when Marius leaves, the camera catches the power and allure of the romance of sea and sail with a shot up the mast of a big, powerful schooner. When Fanny walks anxiously through the streets of Marseille to the gynecologist to confirm what her body already has told her, she moves with quick precision through the crowded streets of a big, bustling and (for 1932) modern city, photographed from a story or two above. When Panisse, astute enough to foresee the decline of sail, takes an overnight trip to Paris, it's to secure a new car dealership! And yet the quaint byways and slower tempos of its outlying hills are preserved in a scene when an overloaded tram stops so a cluster of locals can wrap up a game of boules. The unarticulated but quite palpable sense of community is even reflected by the people-packed poster for the film.
Not only do lovers, parents, grandparents and cronies want to do the right thing. They want to do it for the right reasons. Panisse doesn't want a baby as a possession, or to keep his family name alive. He really loves it -- and Fanny. Fresnay's Marius is impetuous. Demazis's Fanny is a figure of febrile integrity. Charpin's pudgy little Panisse is a giant of generosity. And there's a rightness about Raimu's Cesar, forced to eat his gruff words, to grow up a bit himself by accepting the role of moral arbiter, bringing them full circle. There's much to savor in Fanny heart, language, and, after all these years, emotional immediacy. Pagnol likes his characters, loves his birthplace, and feeds us platter after platter of felt knowledge no less life-sustaining than the Southern sun.
Producers: Marcel Pagnol, Roger Richebe
Director: Marc Allegret
Screenplay: Marcel Pagnol (screenplay and play)
Cinematography: Georges Benoit, Coutelier, Andre Dantan, Roger Hubert , Nikolai Toporkoff
Art Direction: Dominique Drouin, Roland Tual
Music: Vincent Scotto
Film Editing: Raymond Lamy, Jean Mamy
Cast: Raimu (Cesar), Pierre Fresnay (Marius), Orane Demazis (Fanny), Fernand Charpin (Honore Panisse), Mouries (Felix Escartefigue), Robert Vattier (Albert Brun), Marcel Maupi (Innocent Mangiapan chauffeur du ferry-boat), Alida Rouffe (Honorine Cabanis).
BW-140m.
by Jay Carr
