For the next two weeks Gene Siskel Film Center presents a new digital restoration of Marcel Pagnol’s beloved “Marseille Trilogy,” three long dramatic features—Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936)—about a fractured family in the French seaside town. A tale of parenthood and its heartache, the movies struck an emotional chord in France and were enormously successful. Critics noted their lack of visual invention, calling them “canned theater,” but the movies, arriving near the dawn of the talkies, laid down a marker of sorts with their resolutely theatrical style. Pagnol was a popular playwright in Marseille before he got into movies, and both Marius and Fanny had originated on the stage before he produced them for the screen. “The talking film is the art of printing, fixing, and propagating theatre,” he once wrote, and to that end, the trilogy’s sedate visual style focuses one’s attention on the actors and their simple, eloquent dialogue. None are shown to greater advantage than Orane Demazis as the self-sacrificing mother figure in Pagnol’s story and Raimu as the disappointed father figure.
By the time Pagnol turned his attention to completing the trilogy with César, he’d founded his own movie studio in Marseille and assumed the director’s duties himself. The last film is noticeably more polished than its predecessors, largely because the techniques for recording film soundtracks evolved so rapidly in the interim, and Pagnol makes a concerted effort to open up the movie with more location shooting. The original cast members, whom Pagnol took great pains to reunite, are more experienced in front of the camera as well. César, taking place two decades after Marius left home, shows how heavily the fiction surrounding Fanny’s son, Césariot (André Fouché), has weighed on both Fanny and César. Fanny has accumulated years of anger toward Marius, her mother, and the circumstances that crowded her into a false marriage; César loves his illegitimate grandson and regrets the tangled situation his son created. The Marseille Trilogy, with its heavy debt to the theatrical experience, may seem like a relic now, but in emotional terms it hasn’t aged a day. v
Marius Directed by Alexander Korda Sat 2/11, 2:45 PM, and Mon 2/13, 6 PM
Fanny Directed by Marc Allégret Sat 2/11, 5:15 PM, and Wed 2/15, 6 PM
César Directed by Marcel Pagnol Sat 2/18, 3 PM, and Mon 2/20, 6:30 PM
Gene Siskel Film Center 165 N. State 312-846-2800siskelfilmcenter.org $11 each or $25 for all three films
