Fridae

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and this is why remakes rarely work. You can modernise, update, or even reboot an old film favourite and it'll come out wrong precisely because the context for the story is wrong. Then again, you can remake a film successfully by not messing around with its setting and context. If you do that competently enough, you might even sidestep the question "Why do a remake at all?". Two recent remakes typify this rule of thumb: Footloose and True Grit.

To the plus column, we now add La Fille du Puisatier, a remake of a charming 1940 comedy. Daniel Auteuil has good personal and artistic reasons to embark on a remake – in his early career as an actor, his star status was solidified playing roles in three film adaptations of Marcel Pagnol’s novels. In a karmic payback, the actor-turned-director has decided to return the favour to the filmmaker-turned-novelist.

La Fille du Puisatier shows off Pagnol’s interest in the pastoral, his love and sympathetic understanding for the provincialism of small-town types, and a keen observation of their fiercely held, though quaint, mores and codes of honour.

The premise is simple: 18-year-old Patricia Amoretti, the saintly daughter of the local well-digger, gets herself pregnant in an encounter with the son of the provision shop owner. With WW2 just heating up, the young man is sent off to battle the Germans, not knowing the situation while Patricia’s belly grows fuller by the month while her father grows fearsomely angry and her potential in-laws more suspicious than receptive.

If this were a Hollywood film made in 1940, this would make for a melodrama or a triple-hanky weepie extolling girls to preserve their virtues. But this is France! Pagnol takes this sour premise and makes a comedy out of it. It's not that if you're found to be in a scandalous relationship, getting disowned by your parents and community can be a laugh riot. Not exactly. But there is great comedy potential in how far the folk of a small, conservative town might go out of their way to do kindness, restore honour, find face-saving measures to salvage a situation that offends their sense of honour and pride – and it takes a writer like Pagnol, a Parisian who genuinely loves and respects the provinces, to realise it without casting small-town folk as hypocrites or fools.

Under Daniel Autueil's subtle and sensitive direction, La Fille du Puisatier is a far more naturalistic film than the stage-influenced original. Visually, the film is a treat as well. The remake makes best use of colour to seduce us with a Provence whose greenery is eternally draped in sunshine. Sound-wise, the film is equally seductive. Alexandre Desplat's film score weaves popular music and operettas from the 1940s, bring the era to life far more effectively than the stock piano score from the original.