Claude Berri

The Knowledge can’t let the death of Claude Berri pass without some comment. The Guardian is asking if he was the most influential postwar French director. This seems a mite strange given the likes of Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Alan Resnais and, well, countless others. But I take the point. Xan Brooks who wrote the piece means in terms of the way Jean de Florette and Manon des Source (both 1986) helped to define an image of Provence for thousands of Britains. More than, say, Eric Rohmer, Berri, alongside the likes of writer Peter Mayle (most famously A Year in Provence), inspired the dream of France as a lifestyle. His vision of a rural idyll – which lives on in the Stella Artois adverts, even using the theme by Jean-Claude Petit - has not always been looked kindly upon. Gilbert Adair, who edited Penguin’s wonderful anthology, Movies, compared Berri unfavourably with one of his influences, Marcel Pagnol, who made a series of films about the South of France, including Marius and Fanny in the 1930s.

‘What Berri trades in is ‘filmed cinema’ (as one refers to ‘filmed theatre’) and the sickly visuals of his pastiches remind one of nothing so much as the idiom adopted by the sort of spuriously authentic restaurants whose bread is invariably ‘oven-browned’ and whose tomatoes are obligatorily ‘sun dried’. Pagnol’s own wonderful films are just bread, plain loaves of unsliced bread; they are, equally, as juicy and refreshing as ordinary raw tomatoes. Without any smothering of Technicolor Sauce, they taste, like the simplest and best kinds of food, of nothing but themselves.’

Berri also wrote and directed, among others, Germinal (1993), Lucie Aubrac (1997) and Ensemble, c’est tout (2007) and acted in Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002).