Jean de Florette

"I'll never sell the house where my mother was born, and where I hope to live forever until I die as a rich man! We can get by quite well on four thousand francs! I'll buy a mule, a load of miner's tools, and some dynamite to blast this damn rock! In a year I'll pay off the mortgage, and we'll be set!"

"It's over here. See. The spring was by the fig tree. Don't look back! Old man Camoins dug a trench that went down to the end of the field there. That way, the water just ran downhill. Understand? Look by my foot. See how soggy the ground is? The water's blocked, but it'd be easy to release it. That slob let it all go to waste!"

"He'll sell. A pen makes less blisters than a pickax. A farmer may grow a hump, but a hunchback rarely becomes a farmer. Who would have thought that Florette would give birth to a hunchback?"

"If you start to strangle a cat, finish it off!"

"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I hereby name you King of Carnations!"

"It's not me that's crying. It's my eyes."

"Yves Montand - César Soubeyran, "Le Papet""

"Daniel Auteuil - Ugolin"

"Gérard Depardieu as Jean Cadoret / "Jean de Florette""

"Élisabeth Depardieu - Aimée Cadoret"

"Ernestine Mazurowna - Manon Cadoret"

"In the middle of a drought, a farmer is desperate to borrow a mule to help haul water from a nearby spring. He asks his neighbor for the loan of the animal. The neighbor is filled with compassion and sympathy, but simply cannot do without his mule, which he needs in order to farm his own land and provide for his own family. As the neighbor rejects the request, his face is so filled with regret you'd have little doubt he is one of the best of men. Actually, he is a thief. And what he is stealing is the joy, the hope and even the future of the man who needs the mule. Jean de Florette is a merciless study in human nature, set in Provence in the 1920s. It's the story of how two provincial French farmers systematically destroy the happiness of a man who comes out from the city to till the land."

"There are not a lot of highly charged closeups, to turn the story into a series of phony high points. Instead, so many of the shots are surrounded by the landscape and the sky, and there is one enormously dramatic set piece when the sky fills up with rain clouds, and the thunder roars and the rain seems about to come. And then, as Depardieu and his family run outside to feel it against their faces, the rain falls elsewhere and Depardieu shakes his fist at the heavens and asks God why he has been forsaken. But God has not double-crossed him, his neighbors have. And the enormity of their crime is underlined by the deliberate pace of this film, which is the first installment of a two-part epic … We realize here that human greed is patient, and can wait years for its reward. And meantime daily life goes on in Provence, and neighbors pass the time of day and regret that it is impossible to make a loan of a mule."

"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."