Fernand Charpin

The delicate romanticism of The Marseille Trilogy’s opening encounters harsh reality in this installment, which picks up moments after Marius has left his would-be wife, Fanny, for a sailor’s existence. Soon after his departure, Fanny learns that she is pregnant with his child, to the disappointment of her mother and of Marius’s father, César. To secure a better life for her unborn child, she accepts a marriage proposal from the aging widower Honoré Panisse. By turns moving and disarmingly funny, this portrait of heartbreak and its aftermath is buoyed by Pagnol’s openheartedness toward his characters, and by director Marc Allégret’s vivid and assured depiction of colorful Marseille.

In the final chapter of The Marseille Trilogy, Marcel Pagnol returns his compassionate gaze to his weathered characters as they discover the possibility of reconciliation and the durability of love. Leaping forward twenty years, the trilogy continues with the death of Fanny’s husband, Panisse, and the discovery of her secret by her son, Césariot. The young man resolves to track down his biological father, Marius, whose life has been fraught with calamity and poverty. The only film in the trilogy written expressly for the screen and directed by Pagnol, César resolves the protagonists’ star-crossed destinies with the garrulous wit and understated naturalism that have made this epic love story a landmark of humanist filmmaking.