The ending of this film is one of the most exciting in the history of French cinema.

Spoilers – Warning, the article below contains potential spoilers. If you do not want to know its contents, please do not read the following…

Under the strong Provençal sun, in the middle of a scrub desert, shaken by a tireless chorus of cicadas, Claude Berry’s camera miraculously succeeds in replacing Marcel Pagnol’s camera. Adapted from a 1952 film that the legendary French auteur later transformed into a literary diptych, Manon des Sources recaptures the beauty and depth of Panolesque’s work some thirty years later.

• No one saw this coming: the ending of this movie surprised everyone in the 90s

Served by sumptuous photography, superb casting, especially by Daniel Ott and Emmanuel Béart (both César winners), and the original author’s comprehensive poetry, Claude Berry’s film is undoubtedly among the great classics of French cinema.

If it so endures in the memory of our viewers, it is certainly thanks to its brilliant original soundtrack and masterful performances of its main actors, but also thanks to an absolutely unforgettable conclusion.

If you’ve never seen it before, I suggest you don’t continue reading this article to preserve the experience.

“But how is it possible that this letter was lost?”

When he hears his old friend Delphine ask him this question, in the winter cold, when he has just gone to put some carnations on his nephew’s grave, Papet sees his whole life flash in his tired eyes.

He still doesn’t dare believe the old blind woman’s words, but if she is ever telling the truth, decades ago, the young girl he was in love with wrote to tell her that she loved him and that she was expecting a child from him. He did not get an answer to her lost mail, then he got married and had a son.

“Was he born alive?”A paralyzed Cesar Subeiran then pleads with Delphine before enduring the final revelation: “Yes, alive, but curvy.”

In the unexpectedly wide pupils of the masterful Yves Montan, we read a terrible reality: from the city came this young man who claimed to restore the farm of novels to raise rabbits. and whom he watched die of exhaustion without revealing the treasure to him, this Jean de Floret was none other than his own son.

A son who could have grown up in the warmth of the family and become a worthy heir of the Subeirans, if he had not lost this famous letter, or if his loneliness had not turned into bitterness. Before his last breath, César writes a final letter to Manon, in which he tells her that he is her grandfather and bequeaths all his possessions to her.

(Re)discover the trailer for “Jean de Floret”, the first part of the famous diptych…