Marcel Pagnol is best known to the English-speaking public for writing the novel that became the wellspring for the popular Claude Berri films “Jean de Florette” and “Manon des Sources.” Whereas the black and white 1952 version adapted and directed by Pagnol himself is more or less forgotten, Berri’s 1986 diptych made stars of Daniel Auteuil (as the hunchback) and Emmanuelle Béart (as the radiant goatherd) while advertising the bucolic glories of Provençe.

Cineastes treasure Pagnol more as the writer of his great Fanny or Marseilles Trilogy – “Marius” (1931, directed by Alexander Korda), “Fanny” (1932, Marc Allégret), and “Cesar” (1936, Pagnol). In the early 1980s, I was entrusted with selecting frames from these films on a British Film Institute movieola that were subsequently blown up for publication in a movie encyclopedia, and I got used to their languid rhythms and dedication to local rituals – love and passion were not more important to Pagnol than a bottle of pastis and a game of boules. If their stories of generational conflict are trite in their good-natured humanism, their naturalistic evocation of lower-middle class ambience has much about it that is timeless. That they constitute a myth of le Sud is a given. 

In 1940, Pagnol directed from his own script “La Fille du puisatier (“The Well-Digger’s Daughter”), which starred his then-wife Josette Day, Raimu (the great star of the trilogy), and the comic actor Fernandel. It’s now been adapted and directed anew by Auteul, making his debut behind the camera; Variety (paywall website) has reported that his producers were so pleased with it that they’ve given him the go ahead to remake the Fanny Trilogy.

The sunlit tale, cut from the same cloth as “Fanny”/”Marius” and also indebted to “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” is simple to the point of simplistic. Set on the cusp of the Great War, it’s about the misfortunes of a Paris-educated country virgin Patricia (Astrid Bergés-Frisbey, an ornament in  “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”) who meets the rogueish son, Jacques (Nicolas Duvauchelle), of a wealthy store-owner, when she’s taking lunch to her father, Pascal (Auteuil).

Not without her contrivance, the handsome devil gets to carry her back and forth across a stream and gives her a ride home on his motorbike. Taking advantage of Pascal’s fellow well-digger Félipe (Kad Merad), a homely naif who has Papa’s blessing to court Patricia, she subsequently plots to meet Jacques at an air show in which he’s stunt-flying. That evening they make love offscreen – for Auteuil’s film is eminently tasteful – and he immediately departs on a training mission, thence to the Western Front where, it’s later learned, his plane crashed in flames.

Patricia, like Fanny (and Tess), is left pregnant and alone, and Pascal, a reactionary  –  in fact, sexist  – widower who has five other daughters to protect, brutally dispatches her to the home of his unmarried sister. Grieving for Jacques, the storekeeper (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and his wife (Sabine Azéma, woefully theatrical) interfere with Patricia and her newborn, as does Pascal, whose sudden proprietary interest in his grandson causes Auteuil to swamp his movie with comedic dynastic cant.

Like Pagnol before him, he doesn’t follow through on the “Tess”-like fatalism of the story. In contrast with the original, this “Well-Digger’s Daughter” is neither sensual nor amusing  (it doesn’t have the splendid Fernandel wobbling in his absurd jalopy or drunkenly destroying the hat Patricia’s father gave her for her birthday). Instead, it has a Berri-like sincerity and an eye for poppy fields and heavily foliaged avenues – perhaps influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson – down which the lissom Patricia is twice sent running.

If the film is mercifully more visual than its garrulous predecessor, Auteuil ignored the opportunity to deliver a paean to Impressionism in the vein of Jean Renoir’s “Partie de campagne” (1936) or Bertrand Tavernier’s “Un dimanche à la campagne (1984, “A Sunday in the Country”). As with Berri, the style hews closer to French classicism. There’s nothing extraneous about Jean-Francois Robin’s delicate camera movements or his precise images; Alexandre Desplat’s score is on the sober side of romantic. It’s a pleasant if underwhelming experience likely to boost the Provençal vacation trade immeasurably.

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