Marcel Pagnol's famous 'Marsellaise Trilogie' (Marseilles Trilogy) consists of three films, successively MARIUS, FANNY, and CÉSAR (each one named after a leading character), made over a period of six or seven years with the same actors playing the same characters. This trilogy of films thus anticipated by eight decades the bold (and one is glad to say, successful) experiment of the film BOYHOOD (2014, see my forthcoming review), which was made with the same actors playing the same characters over a period of 12 years. Those who have expressed their justified admiration for the wonderful film BOYHOOD should take note that Pagnol was there long before them in showing people's lives evolving before the eyes of the camera over many years. All three of the films in the trilogy were written by Marcel Pagnol, who produced them all, but each one was directed by a separate person, with Pagnol himself directing the third and last. This one was directed by 'Alexandre' Korda, as Alexander Korda was known then. All three of the films are immensely powerful and harrowing emotional dramas, which are filled also with hilarious comedy and fun. Pagnol's brilliant scripts capture all the piquancy and spice of the traditional indigenous Marseilles wit (a mixture of good-natured insults such as 'your wife's fish soup is the worst in Marseilles', plenty of white lies and cheating at cards, rascasse, ballan wrasse, lotte, red mullet, and jokes), with much comedy resulting from Pagnol affectionately making fun of his characters' enthusiastic lack of even the most basic logic, and bizarre habits. The film is made in the Old Port of Marseilles (we see little of the rest of the city), and the creaking of the masts of the moored oceanic sailing ships at the quay is turned up loud on the soundtrack to accentuate the atmosphere and 'the call of the sea'. The story is largely set in the Bar de la Marine on the quay, which is owned and run by the larger-than-life local character named César. His handsome son, Marius, is either 20 or 23 (the scripts vary on this point) and helps his father run the bar. But Marius secretly longs to go to sea in one of the big sailing ships, and as the story progresses, he admits to it being like a madness which afflicts him, his passionate longing to journey to faraway places with exotic names which are always being discussed by the sailors. Ever since he was a child, he has wanted to 'run away to sea', as many young men did in those days. Pagnol, who was from this part of the world, must have known some personally. In this longing, Marius is encouraged by a deranged former sailor who keeps egging him on, and sea captains who want to recruit sturdy young men like Marius for their long voyages. Marius's mother died years before, and he and his father are closely bonded because they have no one else in the family. Just outside the bar is a small shellfish stall run by a young girl of 18 named Fanny. She has been passionately in love with Marius since they were in primary school together. She lives with her widowed mother Honorine on the same quay. Honorine has a separate fish stall, while Fanny sells the shellfish to passers-by. Nearby at the end of the quay is a sail-maker's shop (voilerie) owned by the wealthy and childless widower, Honoré Panisse, aged 50. He has proposed to Fanny, but she has rejected him. Marius is unaware of Fanny's devoted love for him, and thinks only of the sea. These, then, are the simple folk who form the main characters of the three successive film dramas (total duration 375 minutes) which are so brilliantly performed by the inspired cast that they become epic tales mingling the tragedy of Aeschylus with the comedy of Aristophanes, and all on a quay in Marseilles of which one might truly say by way of tribute that 'all the world's a quay'. Although much of the action of these films takes place in closed spaces such as the bar, there is not a single moment in the entire epic saga when one feels that what one is watching on screen is in any way 'stagey' or confined to a small set. The dominant character of César is played by that master-magician of the French screen, Raimu. He and the others all have total mastery of Marseillaise body-language. The way Raimu takes off his apron and wraps it up without thinking, as if he had really done this every day of his life, the way he mixes Honorine's 'mandarine and lemon' drink without even looking at the bottles, every object he reaches for, every doorknob he turns, every gesture he makes, - all of these details bring the character so alive that you cannot believe for an instant that Raimu has ever been anything other than a barkeeper on the quay of the Old Port. How otherwise could he do all of these minutely detailed movements heedlessly and automatically, just as one drives a car sometimes on mental autopilot? Marius, played by the dashing Pierre Fresnay in a neckerchief and with spit-curls on his forehead, is the same. He too seems to have lived and moved always in the bar. Did the cast live on set? How did these miracles of verisimilitude of screen performance occur? And then there is the perfectly cast Orane Demazis as young Fanny. Her heart-rending performance throughout as the love-stricken girl is so pitifully moving that she can bring tears to the viewer's eyes just by throwing herself on the shoulders of people in her recurring despair. She is pretty without being beautiful, and as a slender, unprepossessing dreamy young virgin, she is exactly what a shellfish girl from the quay would have been in those days. Here is authenticity etched in the gold of genius.
Review of Marius
