Saturday Night at the Movies: A Glorious Childhood

Summer Vacation Is Never Long Enough

Imagine a summer break with no science camps, no soccer leagues, no amusement parks - and no screens. Adults are limited to the periphery, mostly there to ring the dinner bell. The rest of the day, it’s you and your friends, exploring the wilderness: finding hidden springs in the woods, catching cicadas, setting traps for local game, exploring caves, coming face to face with owls. In short, having the best months of your lives.

I wrote about the need to give your children such summers here, so I won’t belabor the point. Instead, I hope to give you some cinematic inspiration. With the first day of school rapidly approaching for many of my patients, I thought I would share one of my favorite movies about old-fashioned, child-centered summer vacation.

Marcel Pagnol is one of the big names of 20th century French literature and film. He produced acclaimed translations of Shakespeare and Virgil, he wrote iconic plays and then made movies of them, he made movies and then wrote beloved books based on them; he was no slouch. Cinematically, he is probably best known today for the director Claude Berri’s adaptations of his books: Jean de Florette and its sequel, Manon des Sources, were massive hits in France and internationally and are well worth seeing (here’s a nice review explaining how Pagnol imbued these tales of French peasant feuding with a classical sensibility that makes his work feels more like “a tale from medieval Italian literature” than 20th century France).

Today, however, it is his nonfiction I would like to share. His childhood memoirs were a big literary hit and got their own cinematic adaptations, too. The first, My Father’s Glory, is a charming look at what summer vacation was like for a city boy discovering the beauties of a life set to a country rhythm in the gorgeous mountains and valleys of Provence.

The genius of the film is that it is told entirely from Marcel’s point of view. A young child’s impressions of everything from pregnancy, to romance, to religious conflict, lend a sweet air of humor to what could, in other hands, have been a bitter drama or cruel satire. Best of all, we see the adventures of summer through a boy’s eyes, as he explores the countryside of southern France and gets in various adventures - and misadventures.

The movie is in many ways a love letter from a boy to his father - the plot, inasmuch as there is one, involves Marcel’s attempts to get his scholarly, thoroughly urbanized academic of a father to fit in with the rural, unlettered, nature-loving huntsmen of Provence - yet it is above all a nostalgic love letter from a man to the joys of a free childhood.

It is a true story, and so does honestly depict the over-the-top anticlerical hostility of Pagnol’s atheist father, but trust me, it is not an atheist film by any means. The father’s anti-religious ranting is played for laughs, and, if you stick with it and see what brings the father and the country priest together in the end, you will understand the good-natured, loving mockery of a father’s flaws, and hopefully won’t take the father’s early hostility too seriously.

The film is in French with English subtitles, but don’t let that stop you. Boys hunting for creatures in the woods is a universal language.

Until we can convince Angel Studios to crowdfund Professor Esolen’s childhood into a feature film, this may be the best cinematic boyhood you’re bound to encounter. I hope you enjoy it and have a wonderful end to your summer!