Jean de Florette (1986)

Claude Berri's 1986 adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's novel concerns two Provençal farmers who seal a spring with cement and then watch, with patient malice, as the city man who inherits the land above it fails to keep his crops alive. The newcomer is hunchbacked, earnest, and doomed. He drags water two kilometres by hand, digs a well, buys dynamite, and dies under a flying rock. The film is a study in avarice conducted at the pace of a dry summer. Nobody learns anything. The men who did it get the land.

The classification work here is mercifully brief. The cast is entirely European, and the film makes no gesture toward casting as statement. There is no LGBTQ+ presence, no engagement with racial identity, and no feminist argument, though women do appear: Aimée, the former opera singer; Manon, the daughter; Baptistine, whom the villagers call a witch. They are characters, not positions. The drought is a mechanic of greed, not an environmental crusade. The greed itself is personal and rural, two men and a hidden spring, and it indicts no system. Jean's hunchback is a physical fact and a source of pathos, not a brief for body acceptance. No neurodivergent characters appear, and the period setting is rendered with care but without ideological reinterpretation.

Most notably, the film never lectures. It plants carnations, stops a spring, and lets a man die of exhaustion and dynamite. Roger Ebert wrote of the relentlessness of human greed, and the picture trusts us to arrive there unassisted. There is no sermon, no explanatory scene, no character who exists to voice the theme aloud. That restraint is what makes it a fine film and an empty ledger for the purposes of this tally. The scores sit at the floor, and they sit there honestly.