MOVIE REVIEW : Childhood Memories Sweeten ‘My Father’s Glory’

The late French playwright-filmmaker-novelist Marcel Pagnol was in his 60s when he wrote his multi-volume reminiscences of his youth, and they have a pastoral calmness that’s supremely lulling. Two of these four books, hugely popular in France since their publication in 1960, have at last been filmed: “My Father’s Glory” opens today at the Cove Theatre in La Jolla; its sequel, “My Mother’s Castle,” is scheduled to open in the late summer or early fall.

With the commercial success of the Pagnol-derived two-parter “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring” still hanging heavy in the art-house air, it is to be expected that this new series will pack in audiences who prefer their serials subtitled. “My Father’s Glory” is far from inspired, but at its best it too is pleasantly lulling. It’s meant to be a reverie of what it must have been like to grow up as a boy in the Provencal countryside; the benevolent, dotty parents and quirky uncles and rapscallion friends might have emerged from a French folklore as authentically inauthentic as the American folklore represented by a Norman Rockwell painting.

American folklore often assumes the larger-than-life quality of the tall-tale. Pagnol’s myth-making is more homespun and idealized, and this is perhaps a national trait; when they get sentimental, the French inevitably slide into their pastoral-humanist mode.

It’s doubtful whether Pagnol was interested in representing his childhood in its full emotional violence; he probably wanted to create a memoir that would resonate with readers in a more symbolic and life-affirming mode. His private fantasies of boyhood connect with his audiences’ longings for the childhood they never had but always wanted.

In “My Father’s Glory,” the events are mostly sunny. Marcel (played by Benoit Martin, then Julien Ciamaca) is a precocious, wide-eyed cherub; his father, Joseph (Philippe Caubere), is a schoolteacher who, wonder of wonders, actually loves to teach; his mother, Augustine (Nathalie Roussel), all delicate smiles, is a seamstress. It’s an enraptured childhood, and it reaches its epiphany when the family, with Aunt Rose (Therese Liotard) and the irrepressible Uncle Jules (Didier Pain), vacation in the mountainous southern region Bastide Neuve. There, Marcel abandons himself to the countryside--a boyhood paradise of whirring cicadas and hoot owls.

It’s not exactly a portrait of the artist as a young man, but Pagnol was a special kind of artist. He used naturalism for its power to evoke common experience, and so many of the events in “My Father’s Glory” (rated G) seem less like personal recollections than animated family-album snapshots.

The 70-year-old director Yves Robert understands as well as did Pagnol how the perspective of years has a becalming effect on childhood memories. (Robert early in his career worked with Pagnol.) Nothing in this movie is forced or demonstrative; it’s conceived as one long bliss-out.

Even on its own undemanding terms, however, “My Father’s Glory” is often too dreamily conventional for its own good--much more so than the Pagnol source material. Marcel, particularly the older Marcel, isn’t a captivating enough camera subject; the movie never seems like an emanation of his sensibility, or anyone else’s either. That’s the problem with this idealized approach to memory: It gets anonymous awfully fast.

When he first enters Bastide Neuve, the adult Marcel tells us on the soundtrack that the experience proved to be life-changing, but we don’t see the rapture this landscape would hold for the boy. Robert keeps things sedate and orderly; we have to intuit the bliss, because it’s definitely not there in the imagery or the performances.

There’s another problem: “My Father’s Glory” is so resolutely pure-in-heart and cheerful that it seems to exist solely to massage the audience’s virtuousness. There’s a slight condescension in the method, as if we couldn’t respond to a movie about childhood with any impudence or shadings.

There’s so little conflict in this film that it never seems like anything of value is at stake. Marcel is finally just an affable kid who loves the country and doesn’t want to go back to school. “My Father’s Glory” is lovely but it doesn’t demand anything from you. In the end, that approach can be just as wearying as the kind of movie that’s forever grabbing at your throat.

‘My Father’s Glory’

Philippe Caubere: Joseph

Nathalie Roussel: Augustine

Didier Pain: Uncle Jules

Julien Ciamaca: Marcel

An Orion Classics release. Director Yves Robert. Producer Alain Poire. Screenplay by Lucrette Andrei. Cinematographer Robert Alazraki. Editor Pierre Gillette. Costumes Agnes Negre. Music Vladimir Cosma. Production design Jacques Dugied. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

MPAA-rated: G.