These two films by Yves Robert tell similar stories two times, first as the narrator remembers his father, then his mother. The films are quiet and warm, and creep up on you with small moments of charm. At first they don't seem to be about much of anything. They meander. To a viewer accustomed to the machinery of plots, they play like a simple series of episodes. Then the episodes add up to a childhood. And by the end of the second film, the entire foundation for a life has been re-created, in memories of the perfect days of childhood. Of course the films are sentimental. Who would want it any other way? The films are based on the childhood of Marcel Pagnol, the French novelist and filmmaker whose twinned novels, "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of the Spring," were turned into wonderful films a few years ago. The new movies are narrated by the hero, Marcel, as an adult. We see him as a young man of 10 or 12. His father, Joseph, is a schoolteacher in the city, and his mother, Augustine, is a paragon of domestic virtue. One summer they journey out to the hills of Provence to take a cottage and spend their vacation. These hills are to become the focus of Marcel's most enduring love affair. He loves the trees and the grasses, the small birds and the eagle that nests high in a crag, the pathways up rock faces and the way that voices carry from one side of a valley to another. And it is there that he begins to understand who his parents are, and to love them.
Here is a story of courage by the Australian filmmaker Paul Cox, who tells of the dying weeks in the life of an old woman played with great and particular humor and power by Sheila Florance. She still lives with her canary in her own apartment, looks after old Billy, who lives next door and gets himself into trouble, and despairs of the landlord who wants to evict her. She has been assigned a visiting nurse, and as she and the nurse become friends, they share their deepest thoughts, and we learn, yes, that old people think about love and lust as much as young ones. The nurse is having a love affair, and the old lady cheers her on. All the time she knows she is dying, and she insists on dying with dignity in her own home. There is a poignant undertone to the story, because Sheila Florance was also dying as the film was made (she passed away earlier in 1991) and some days was too sick to film, although you would never guess it from this film. Florance won the Australian Academy Award for her performance. (The movie has opened for U.S. Academy consideration in Los Angeles and New York, and will roll out nationally in February.)
The British director Mike Leigh has never made a film that didn't place on my annual Best 10 list, but there was an enormous gap between his first, "Bleak Moments," in 1972, and his second, "High Hopes," in 1989. Although he works much on the British stage, his methods discourage film financiers, because he creates his films in collaboration with the actors; together, over a long period, they invent their characters and dialogue in improvisations. With "Life Is Sweet," this method has produced a film of great humor, set in a London suburb, and involving a couple and their twin daughters, who are 20ish. One twin is cheerful and sunny; the other is a gloomy, chain-smoking depressive. The girls are always on each other's cases, while the father dreams of liberation through a mobile hot dog wagon, and his wife also wants to express herself more fully. In ways as unpredictable as they seem natural, these characters reveal one surprise after another, in a film of wit and humanity.
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