I saw this film during my foreign film phase. American films had started to become too bland and predictable so I decided to give the foreign ones a shot. Subtitles didn't bother me because I already had a history of viewing flicks like those. When I was a kid, my Chinese grandfather used take us to the Saturday matinees at Ascot Cinema on Eastern Main Road in Sangre Grande where Chinese subtitled imports were playing, so I got used to them."Jean de Florette" stunned me, took me by surprise. At first I thought it, and its sequel, "Manon of the Spring," were going to be the most dreaded of all genres - love stories. They weren't. Everything about this movie was perfect - cinematography, acting, direction, everything. I can't recommended this movie and its sequel enough.

In post World War I Provence, unscrupulous patriarch Papet and his nephew Ugolin are planning to acquire some land from a local who dies, in the course of which they block up the spring on the land, the source of local water. The land is inherited by a stranger - the titular Jean de Florette - who moves in with his wife and small daughter, and begins to put his own plans into operation. Jean, trying to unblock the spring, dies in an explosion, his wife and daughter have to move, and Papet and Ugolin acquire the land. But there is a sequel...This subtitled French language film (which provided both the music and the ambiance of the UK Stella Artois commercials of the 90s and noughties) is first rate. The story is strong, the characters are stronger, and the feeling of 'tween-Wars rural France is stronger still. Gerard Depardieu as John, Yves Montand as Papet, and Jean Auteuil as Ugolin are all excellent.Just bear in mind that you can't watch it in isolation - you HAVE to watch the sequel, Manon Des Sources immediately afterwards.

I just watched Jean De Florrete and it was great, very rare for me to say this but I was not once bored or restless during the entire movie. Jean De Florrete, about this French farmer who moves onto his uncle's land and decides it would be profitable to grow flowers. But in order to grow a enough flowers to make a profit they'll need more water than they have available. Their neighbor has an untapped underground spring. The farmer and his uncle go over to negotiate buying the land with the spring on it. Unfortunately for them their neighbor hates the uncle, and when they offer to buy some of his land the uncle and him get into a fight and during the bustle his head suffers a fatal blow against a rock and he dies almost instantaneously. The whole ordeal took place by a tree, so the farmer and his uncle make it look like the old man fell from the tree and hit his head. They think the land will be theirs but a relative of the neighbor, a hunchback, moves onto the property. The uncle offers to buy the land from him but the hunchback wants to use it for raising rabbits and growing squash. Fascinating to watch the triumphs and failures of the hunchback as he goes about trying to fulfill his dream, always with a happy upbeat attitude. The thing that amazed me about the movie would be just how simple the actual plot feels. There are no huge twists, no distracting sub-plots, not much happens for most of the movie until the last 15 minutes; despite that it manages to grab the viewers attention wonderfully and it doesn't let it go until the credits roll either. Unless you hate French movies. I highly recommend Jean De Floret.

I have many favorites, and this is one of the crème de la crème. This is a visually stunning film more like beautiful photographic montage. It is simple, tragic story well told, unlike many of today's plots - implausibly lame, suffering on a CGI crutch for 85 minutes. The simple story is about enduring truths which have been the mainstay of the Greek classics and Shakespeare: Our human strengths, our failings, our virtues, and our vices. The story may be a fiction, but its kernel is not. It is stories and story telling like this which has kept our rapt attention for four thousand years.First we should understand that this film is only the first half the novel by Marcel Pagnol which would have been too long as a single film, and out of necessity, was shot as two. The second half is titled, Manon of the Spring. Neither film stands alone as satisfactory because, obviously, it would be incomplete, and naturally, is also important that the two halves be viewed in sequence. For a fairly dispassionate précis of the plots, I suggest reading the ones on Wikipedia, so I won't be repetitive here. I also recommend reading the boards for comments and discussions.JdF & MotS were both shot at the same time in 1986 with a budget of $17 million making it/them the biggest budget French films up to that time. JdF grossed $86M worldwide, and of that sum, only $4.9M was from the USA. MotS grossed $56M worldwide, of which only $3.9M was from the USA. In other words, culture films are not a good fit for the American viewing audience, and the gross revenue numbers bear this out. The rest of the world seems to bear out this conclusion.Foreign language films rarely do well in the USA for the simple reason that the vast majority of the viewing audience are unilingual anglophones who do not wish to burden themselves with having to work at "understanding" their entertainment - they wish to merely consume it. If it requires the work of reading subtitles or thought, it becomes unpalatable. This film requires your attention and thought!But to be fair to the US viewers, the subtitles are at times incomplete or inaccurate, and unlike the spoken word, they do not convey the emphasis or importance of certain bits of dialogue well. The plot is woven steadily throughout the film, so the viewers with no understanding at all of the French language are missing essential dialogue, and therefore plot.The bottom line is this: You will either be entranced by these two films and love them, or you will be bored by the first 15 minutes, and you'll translate that into "bad film." If your highest quality level of reading is Marvel comics then I suggest you stay away from this one.However, I recall years ago walking into a video store where this was playing on all the monitors. All the patrons in the store, ranging in age from 5 to 75 years, were standing transfixed watching this film. There was something magical about it!