35 years of Manon of the Spring
On November 19, 1986 in France, the sequel to the film "Jean de Florette", which was called "Manon des sources (Manon of the Spring)", was released in cinemas.
Both parts were directed by Claude Berri. Moreover, both movies were filmed at the same time. Accordingly, they have a common history of creation. It's just that the creators of both parts decided to separate their screenings in time, and therefore the second part was presented to moviegoers three months later.
As is often the case with sequels, the success of Manon from the Source was slightly lower than that of the first part of the dilogy. Around 600 thousand less moviegoers gathered in France for the film and, accordingly, the box office was $ 1 million less. Rita Kempley, the Washington Post's film columnist, noted in her review in this regard that the experiment of producers with breeding during the release of the two parts of the film turned out to be a box-office success, but made "Manon" a victim.
"Manon of the Spring" has received fewer prestigious film award nominations than the first part of the dilogy. But in the competition for the British BAFTA film award in the category of Best Foreign Language Film "Manon from the Source" was on an equal footing with "Jean de Florette". That is, both films gave way to Andrei Tarkovsky's "Offret (The Sacrifice)".
Both films also showed the same success in nominations for the CĂ©sar Award of the French Film Academy. Only "Jean de Florette" received CĂ©sar in the category Best Actor (Daniel Auteuil), and "Manon of the Spring" was awarded this award in the category Best Supporting Actress (Emmanuelle BĂ©art).
The range of opinions of professional film critics regarding "Manon of the Spring" turned out to be quite wide. So, the above-mentioned Rita Kempley condescendingly arrogantly called the film "only a continental soap opera".
The New York Times film reviewer Vincent Canby said about the film in about the same vein, noting in his review that "The movie is stuffed with cues for arias that are never heard".
However, more authoritative film critics gave the film "Manon of the Spring" fundamentally different assessments. So, the guru of American film critic Roger Ebert, who put 3.5 stars for the first part of the duology, rated the second part with maximum 4 stars. And another authoritative American film critic James Berardinelli, who rated the film "Manon of the Spring" also to the maximum - 4 stars, wrote in his review: "When Berri completed Jean de Florette/Manon des Sources, he may not have recognized that he had crafted one of the greatest French films of all time, but he certainly understood that the duology would be seen as an achievement. Few films develop characters as deep and multi-dimensional as those represented here. Rather than taking the easy and less satisfying route of relying upon stereotypes to form the background of his movie's population, Berri expends the necessary time for the lost art of characterization. There are certainly protagonists and antagonists, but simplistic labels like "hero," "villain," "good," and "evil" become irrelevant. There's a karmic sense of justice in the way things evolve, but this isn't one of those movies where the bad guys get their comeuppance in the final reel. Things play out more subtly, and with a much grander sense of tragedy." And this is probably the most adequate assessment of the film.
Claude Berri's film "Manon of the Spring" was also highly rated by modern moviegoers. 71% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave the film ratings from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Claude Berry's film "Manon of the Spring" according to FilmGourmand's version was 8.166, which allowed the film to take 502nd Rank in the Golden Thousand.
