"The plot of Jean de Florette is as melodramatic as any soap opera, but its treatment is just a little askew, just off-center enough for the film to evolve into a moving and powerful pastoral tragedy. The film is a naturalistic story about the dehumanizing effect of greed on a community and on the human soul. Watching the hunchbacked Jean de Florette (Gérard Depardieu) struggle against all odds to keep his small farm alive, maintaining to the bitter end his optimism and naïve faith in his reference books, is like watching Sisyphus make his daily toil up the hill."
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Dan Jardine, in review at AllMovie
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_de_Florette
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Jean de Florette
Jean de Florette is a 1986 French period drama film directed by Claude Berri, the first of two films adapted from the 1966 two-volume novel The Water of the Hills by Marcel Pagnol, followed by Manon des Sources. The film takes place in rural Provence, where two local farmers scheme to trick a newcomer out of his newly inherited property. At the time the most expensive French film ever made, it was a great commercial and critical success, both domestically and internationally, and was nominated f
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