Le Château de ma mère

Unsurprisingly, this sequel to La Gloire de mon père, adapted from the second volume of Marcel Pagnol's autobiography, is very similar in tone (though mercifully more sparing with the music). Your attitude to it depends on whether you viewed the first film as a touching evocation of a Provence childhood, or as a tedious travelogue drowning in sentiment. The storyline is enlivened early on by a disillusioning encounter between young Marcel and a most pretentious girl whose father (vividly played by the wonderful Rochefort) is an absinthe-crazed would-be poet who speaks in rhyming couplets à la Cyrano. From there on, the tone darkens, with Marcel's father persuaded away from the path of rectitude; and before long the narrator is rounding things off with a solemn roll-call of the dear departed. The coda, in which the adult Pagnol conjures up a vision of his mother as she was in his childhood, is very moving.