Fanny

If you can get by the first fifteen minutes, get into the leisurely pacing and that fact that nothing is going to explode and no one shoots anybody or stabs anyone in the eye, and the film is about learning to live with other human beings, about being a parent, about falling and staying in love, perhaps you'll come to love this film, too.

The trilogy is set in another time long gone--Marseilles, a provincial fishing village, where Cesar and his son operate a sort of bar where locals drift in and out and play cards; a pretty young woman sells seafood outside, and she's known son Marius since they were children. Enough said: except that the acting is amazingly naturalistic for a 1930's film, that the performance by famed French entertainer Raimu is beyond words, is simply astounding in his range of emotions, his understanding of the human condition. This understated drama is a quiet masterpiece.

French playwright Marcel Pagnol, hooked on cinema since 1929, knew a sequel to one of his most famous plays which was turned into a movie would be a winner. When Paramount Pictures refused to produce a follow-up to 'Marius,' Pagnol formed his own film production company, and with the assistance of director Marc Allegret, released October 1932 "Fanny" to great acclaim.

Pagnol had seen his 1929 play 'Marius,' adapted into a 1931 film of the same name, directed by Alexander Korda. The story centered around a son of a Marseilles, France, bar-owner, Marius, who yearns to see the world by getting a job for a long sea voyage even though he had a serious relationship with his girlfriend Fanny. "Marius" was a success for Paramount. After the studio turned down Pagnol's offer for a sequel, the playwright proceeded to write a script penned as "Fanny" and make a movie from it. The difference in quality between the two films reflects the evolution of film technology that progressed quickly during that short period. Whereas the original was a stage-bound affair with most of its scenes constricted inside the tavern, 1932's "Fanny's" camera is more mobile, capturing exterior footage of Marseilles and tracking Fanny (Orane Demazis) throughout the city. Director Allegret hid his camera inside a van to capture the city's residents going about their business unaware they were on film. Because of such shots, producer Pagnol has been called a pioneer in cinema Neorealism, mixing both the dramatic plot of the movie with real-life scenes.

In "Fanny," the last night the two lovers spend together before Marius sets out on his five-year voyage results in a pregnancy. Upon discovering the budding life in her womb, Fanny turns to Honore Panisse (Charpin), a prosperous sea merchant who's 30 years older. In 'Marius,' he had proposed to Fanny, only to be rejected. In the sequel, Fanny is resigned to accept his proposal to marry for the sake of her newborn. Then, after two years at sea, Marius, on shore leave, surprises Fanny. That's when Pagnol makes things very interesting for all those involved. Film critic Jamie Rich said "the acting is so good, you might find yourself wishing this were an ongoing series."

Riding on the success of "Fanny," Pagnol wrote a sequel to the sequel. He gave up composing stage plays to make feature films, and he directed the third of his so-called 'Marseilles Trilogy,' 1936's 'Cesar.' The movie picks up the story of Fanny where her son, Cesariot, is a young man and is told about who his real father is after his adopted father Panisse died.

"Fanny's" international popularity gave French cinema a boast in both quality and popularity. Pagnol's trilogy has been made into several motion pictures, the first a James Whale directed and Preston Sturges scripted, 1938s "Port of Seven Seas." The three stories were combined into a 1954 Broadway musical, running an astounding 888 performances. The 1961 Technicolor film, "Fanny," with Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer, blends all three scripts of Pagnol's into one full-length film. And the Daniel Auteuil directed, written and acted 2013 "Fanny" was based on the 1932 version.

The sequel to "Marius" the year before stays in the same vein and is the same kind of staged theatre all the way, with the same kind of virtuoso performances by all the actors, but there is another director, and you miss the Alexander Korda flamboyance and liberal sweeps and flow of the movie tempo. This film is more like chamber theatre all the way, and you don't even see much of the harbour, the glorious ships, the street life and the joints. Fanny, left alone and pregnant by Marius going to sea for five years, marries another older suitor, just to give her child a future and safe environment, and it works out well, until Marius comes back after only two years as a most unsuspected surprise and does his best to complicate things but immediately leaves again. The story isn't much, it is very inferior to the first part, but there is a third part four years later, which will show the end of the story, directed by Marcel Pagnol, the author, himself - he made many films besides being a prolific Provence writer.

FANNY is the second film of a trilogy, based upon a play by Marcel Pagnol, from which all three works are taken, featuring most of the cast of excellent actors which made the stage original a great artistic and popular success, including Raimu, Charpin, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis as Fanny, an assemblage which remains faithful to the heart of the original. By repudiating the normal placement of concurrent French films made in Parisian studios, and producing the work in his native Marseilles, in Provence, Pagnol achieves a finely-hewn naturalism which is very congenial to the scenario, dealing as it does with a hard-working bourgeoisie whose lives are in concert with rhythms of a major seaport. Fanny's passionate attention to Marius (Fresnay) results in her pregnancy from their farewell coupling at the denouement of the first of the trilogy, MARIUS, with her lover falling prey to the lure of a seafaring life and she, abandoned, accepts a proposal of marriage from a much older M. Panisse (Charpin), in order to save the reputation of her family. The love of Panisse for the child of Fanny is the moving force in what must be the inevitable fulfillment of the storyline, i.e., the return of Marius to claim his erstwhile fiancée and his true child in a scene which brings the best from Demazis, Fresnay, and Raimu as Cesar, the father of Marius and lifelong friend of Panisse. Pagnol directed only the finale of the trio, and selects for FANNY Marc Allegret, who leads the cast with distinction, displaying particular skill when allowing Pagnol's magnificent dialogue to be developed in what is essentially a filmed work for the stage, with few sets, and who allows liberal emphasis upon the plastic Raimu, who is, after all, the most important presence in this romantic masterpiece.

I have just finished watching Proof, a film released in the year of our Lord, 2005, which is adapted from a stage play in which the director has gone to great pains to hide the fact that his work is based on the play. flash back 70 years and we have a movie made that looks like a filmed stage play with real locations replacing the stage sets. All early sound movies feel set-locked as people talk and deliver within the range of the camera. Therefore, to hold the interest to the modern viewer, the dialogue and acting must be believable and engaging. The film fails to achieve it for the most part because the performance of the actress playing Fanny is a total success even though she was reprising her role from the stage. First time director, Pagnol adapting his own stage works suffers from a non-visual eye. The delight, is French star Raimu who delivers a performance still worthy to the eye even today. There is a reason Orson Welles called him a genius. The melodramatic plot of a scorned, (maybe that is too strong a word: even abandoned is too strong because she never lets on to her man that she does not want him to leave) woman who is pregnant is passé though common in the literature of the period. I remember a tracking shot that impressed me as the camera follows Fanny through the streets as she suspects she is pregnant. In the way it is handled and executed, it is cinematic authorship at its finest. It is a film in the middle of the trilogy, therefore there are loose ends left to be resolved. All movies are time capsules, it is said, therefore approach this with the right attitude and you might be rewarded.