Belle Époque

Ink-stained fingers, red-bound illustrated prize-books, immaculate white sheets, generous pillows to sink into the "arms of Morpheus", thick slices of fresh bread lovingly buttered, coffee in bowls, the upright, disciplined loops of IIIe République handwriting, kids in sailor outfits, corsetted women sheathed in flowing fabrics, who sport elaborate buns and suffer from "weak lungs"...

I don't know why I was suddenly inspired to watch La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère, two movies that I last saw when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old — Yves Robert's enchanting adaptations of Marcel Pagnol's memoirs about his childhood in the early 1900s.

I remember I liked them at the time: I went back to the theatre several times. I was quite moved by these simple stories of a happy, loving family from Marseilles that spends the summer vacation in the hills of Provence (a rustic Provence, spared for a while still the terrible wars that would come, and also the myriad American millionaires, the Russian mobsters, the German and Dutch tourists with their fully-souped-up camping cars, the countless iphone-toting yuppy exiles from the north of France fleeing the pale sun...). And I was moved again today, almost to tears.

It's funny, the emotions movies are able to summon, irresistibly: like the tears you can't help but shed for the poor dying E.T., who just wants to go home... It's the special empathic spell they cast, I guess.

Here, we are made to feel a poignant nostalgia for a magical and bygone childhood world, made of warmth and sunshine and innocence and motherly love and the ebb and flow of Vladimir Cosma's brassy horns and soupy strings... Calling forth the ghosts of the past, we learn, in a dreamy haze, illuminates and warms the present — but it also makes the heart ache.