Time, Space and the Joy of Evil JEAN DE FLORETTE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Shrewd, grasping, rich old Cesar Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his simpleton nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) covet their neighbor's land. Each has his reasons, but they are not good enough. Not enough, that is, to justify their terrible plot to force the decent, innocent newcomer known as Jean de Florette (Gerard Depardieu), his patient wife and lovely child to sell their holdings at a distressed price. The Soubeyrans' idea is simple: stop up the neighbor's spring. But the execution is grim and protracted; the plotters stand by, offering sympathy but no practical assistance as Jean descends first to exhaustion, then to madness, finally to death as he tries to fight an extended drought with the few gallons of water he can painfully haul from a ; spring that is many rugged miles away.

The time is some 60 years ago. The place is equally distant, a primitive part of Provence. Why do the machinations of these villains grip us so vividly? Jean is an idealistic tax collector who leaves the city to live close to nature. Why does his fate move us so deeply? Above all, by what means does this cruel tale of victimization -- there is rarely a film that so relentlessly documents the meanness of the human spirit -- manage to release in us, of all ironies, such a spirit of joyous welcome?

Partly it is a matter of emotional scale. This is not a movie of halfway measures. The wicked are irredeemably wicked, the good unalterably good. No one is permitted to slip into anything a little more comfortable and up to date, like ambiguity or absurdism. And no one is permitted to loiter palely among his half-formed thoughts.

Take Montand's Cesar, for example. His stride, his gesture, his voice bespeak implacable authority. Even his mustache reinforces the message. It is not the adornment of routine villainy, crimped and primped, but an ample, well-rooted assertion of masculine self-sufficiency, of immunity to the judgments of common men. He possesses himself as confidently as he grasps his wealth and standing in the community. His antagonist Jean has toiled since birth under the curse of a hunchback. He knows all about burdens, yet his endurance under new ones is almost unbearable to witness. When at last he cracks and curses God, Depardieu makes us feel the ground shifting not just under his feet but under our own as well. As for Auteuil, bound to his uncle by blood, drawn to Jean by compassion, he gives perhaps the most intelligent performance of obtuseness on record, always taking his character up to the edge of understanding, then falling back into confusion.

Acting on the grand scale compounds our relief at slipping free of our modernist bonds, of regressing happily to a time when our serious fictions were both sure and energetic in their morality. But such works require time and space to grow properly. Compression is an invitation to contrivance, forced coincidence and melodrama. And Director-Adapter-Producer Berri (The Two of Us) refused to reduce this film to that level. Using L'Eau des Collines, a two-volume novel by Marcel Pagnol (which was itself a reworking of material the author used in a commercially failed film), Berri pursued the rights to a book he loved for six years before Pagnol's widow relented to him. Determined . to make a separate film of each portion of the novel simultaneously and equally committed to show the passing of seasons and years and their effects on his characters, he ended with the most expensive ($17 million) project in French film history.

Above all, the money bought Berri amplitude. His people are almost never isolated in close-ups that would falsely heighten either their emotions or the audience's reaction. The characters are mostly seen at some distance from the camera -- framed against and dwarfed by the abrupt Provencal landscape. Not one shot ever implies that they might achieve even momentary dominance over this country and climate. Quite the contrary. Even when they are sheltered from its wayward tempers, their comforts -- even Cesar's -- are at once crude and fragile.

The spaciousness of Berri's style is, of course, old-fashioned, so much so that it strikes us with the force of something new. But its most important function is to link his work with two currently disused narrative traditions. One is that of the naturalistic novel, which insists on locating characters within a detailed rendering of their world, forcing the reader to recognize that the seemingly minor incidents of life reveal the workings of vast, elemental forces. The other, astonishingly enough, is Greek drama, in which the psychological intimacy among characters is irrelevant, since their destinies are determined by the workings of blind fate. Though naturalism is the controlling mode of Jean de Florette, audiences should bear the Greek model in mind when Manon des Sources, the second part of this work, is released in the fall. In it the eerily beautiful Emmanuelle Beart plays Jean's daughter Manon, now grown up and ready to take vengeance on her father's tormentors. To be prepared for this classic drama is one more reason -- though none is needed -- to see Jean. Indeed, the crowds emerging from the theater in the opening weeks seemed ready to line up at once.