The Well-Diggers' Daughter

The well-digger and his family marching home from town.

 

For some reason, the 2011 French film The Well-Digger's Daughter reminded me of the 1938 American film Four Daughters--two movies in the same spirit?  The French film is based on a story by the beloved writer Marcel Pagnol and was directed by tFrench actor Daniel Auteuil, who plays the part of the well-digger, a widower with six daughters living in the southern Provence region of France right on the cusp of World War I.

 

The well-digger's two older daughters take care of the family, but the movie concerns one daughter in particular--the very beautiful Patricia, who had grown up in Paris as the child-companion of a wealthy woman. Returning to her birthplace, Patricia takes on the job of rearing the younger girls in the family and with her sister, all the housekeeping chores that keep her father and his brood intact. Woe to Patricia when she by chance meets the good-looking son of the local retailer, who soon woos the saintly young woman, who, despite her humble background, has the air of refinement of a Parisian. Within a day of the wooing, the young man is off to war, leaving Patricia, who, it turns out, is now pregant. Crisis in the home of M. Pascal Amoretti, well-digger. Amoretti's attempts to marry his daughter off to his co-worker are of no avail, and he bids her to leave home and have her child at her aunt's in a town far enough away, he hopes, that no scandal will come to his name and household.

The rest of the movie concerns the reconciliation of father with daughter and with the family of the seducer, which had had no interest in aiding Patricia or her offspring.

 

Patricia delivers the mid-day meal to her father (r) and his co-worker, who is smitten with her.

 

I found The Well-Digger's Daughter a beautifully made and thoroughly charming story from beginning to end. I found it on Netflix and from the comments and reviews I have read, it appears that people either love or hate this film. I deeply appreciated it, because it was filled with an innocence and lack of cynicism so rare in cinema today. At the point of its ending, I was in joy at the experience of watching it--the subject is love in the family--sans caveats, grudges, conditions, accusations, bitterness, regrets, rebellions, resentments, condemnations, or at least not for long.

I have never read any books by Marcel Pagnol's but I also found charming two French films based on his autobiographical works, My Father's Glory (1990) and My Mother's Castle (both available at Netflix). Watching them, I can see why joie de vivre is a French phrase.

Pascal Amoretti embraces his fallen daughter.



Photo of the Year

After the fire from Hurricane Sandy at Breezy Point, New York.

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

A Mirror to Ourselves

 

The Penitent Magdalene (detail) by Georges de la Tour, 1638

 

Everyone, even those who have never been parents, has been shocked, upset, and concerned about the horrific murder of 20 young children and six adults at the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School. We have no real words; we try to say prayers that God will bring comfort to the families who have lost their sweet children in such a completely senseless orgy of blood.

But somehow I believe we all know or fear that this incident--so stark in its wanton taking of the most innocent of human life--is a mirror to ourselves. How have we acted, unknowingly or not, to contribute to this heinous act, from which any decent human being recoils in horror?

Those who demand quick fixes or one-on-one causality may lay the blame at the gun or at our lack of care for the mentally ill and agitate for legislative fixes to these problems. But these are unlikely to ameliorate the situtation, we secretly and mournfully think.

The problem lies deeper, we believe in our heart of hearts, in something wrong in all of us--in our sins, not only in the myriad of causes that led to the grave sinning of the deranged perpetrator. Has our society allowed or even encouraged the light of the good to sputter, to grow faint? Have we succumbed to darkness in our hearts, borne of selfish fixation on ourselves? Has our lack of fervor for goodness, truth, and light created a society that instead nourishes the darkness that hides in every man, waiting for but the opportunity, or despair, to spring?

These are the questions we ask ourselves. And so, I found the most powerful and poignant response to this tragedy to come from the father mourning for his dead and lovely six-year-old daughter who declared his compassion for the family of his child's murderer. "I cannot imagine what they are going through," he said.

We know, secretly in our heart of hearts, that evil flourishes in the vacuum left by our turning away from the commandments of love. Now is the time to look within and see how we have compromised with the darkness, slackened our vigilance, reacted with anger and hatred, rather than reaching out with love.

"It is Christmastime, and the problems of the world remain," as the priest said in a Christmas homily I heard two years ago. "Yes, the problems remain, but it is we who have changed because Christ is born and is in our hearts."

This Christmas more than ever.

"For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy upon us."

Prayers

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Corn, by Daniel Garber, 1937

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Can Civic Duty Replace the Golden Rule?

The Golden Rule by Norman Rockwell

In today's Wall Street Journal today Laura Kreutzer, assistant managing editor of private equity in the newsletter group at Dow Jones, writes about how she has a hard time convincing her seven-year-old daughter to perform acts of civic-minded charity. When her Girl Scout troop was planning to help with a neighborhood cleanup, her daughter wanted nothing to do with it. "Although we have tried to raise Neva to be kind to others, I don't think we've done enough to instill a sense of commitment to the community around her. I don't necessarily need to raise the next Mother Teresa, but I also don't want to raise the next Gordon Gekko."

After discussing this conundrum with her husband and a friend, Ms. Kreutzer decides that "we are going to try to do a better job of getting the family active in community-service activities. For starters, we plan to contribute to local relief efforts for areas of the Northeast, including our own state, hardest hit by the recent hurricane. As the holidays approach, I'm also signing us up for a local charity drive that provides clothing and other items for people in need."

I applaud Ms. Kreutzer for trying to induce her child to be less selfish and for providing a role model for giving to the community, but I am deeply saddened by the paucity of intellectual and emotional equipment she has to do the job of inducing charity in her daughter. Ms. Kreutzer makes no reference to religion of any kind. Without access to the rich mine of religious thought that links individual acts of charity and goodness to the goodness of the universe as created by a loving Father, Ms. Kreutzer is left encouraging the abstraction of civic duty. To the question of Why, she has no real explanation and takes the option of offering carrots to reward charitable behavior.

But charity for the sake of a reward, at least in this world, is not the point of charity in the Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the bedrocks upon which our civilization was founded. In a Christian household, for example, at a very early age one learns the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Embedded in this rule is the assumption that each individual person is made in the living image of God. Love thy neighbor as thyself. We have the story of the Good Samaritan as an example of what being a good neighbor means and of who the neighbor is--the stranger lying on the side of the road. We have Christ saying to Peter, "If you love me, feed my sheep."  This Christian emphasis on charity was rooted in Judaism.

The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1644--the neighbor is the stranger lying on the side of the road.

For this reason, within Judeo-Christian culture, young children are taught that they must share their toys, that being "selfish" is not a good, and are brought into habits of charitable giving. This is not because our parents simply want us to be this way, but, we are taught, because this is the way in which we take our place as a contributing part of God's moral order of the universe. This is the way we participate in God's love, how we return His love. Love of God and of others is the force within us that compels charity.

There is nothing unscientific about this view. Charity, as Ms. Kreutzer recognizes, is necessary for the cohesion of society. A society which loses the concept of charity as a norm runs the grave risk of producing psychopaths and of human beings for whom "the other" as a concrete being like oneself, and not a utopian abstraction,  is a nonexistent. Charity is essential to nurturing the capacity for empathy, without which our society descends into increasingly harsh cruelty.

Ms. Kreutzer's article makes me fear that, without religion--now considered by so many as irrelevant, retrograde, and unscientific--our civilization is skating on very thin ice indeed.