The Children of the Marshland (1999)

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

A Masterpiece!

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

I picked this film up in a French gas station promotion several years ago and watch it from time to time. The film drips nostalgia....I'd almost expect Gabin or Fernandel to appear as it unfolds. And in a way you do see them - Michel Serrault (adieu), Suzanne Flon - their presence evokes French cinema of yore. Others evoke the classic French cinema of today - Villeret and Dussollier the consummate journeymen. This ensemble plays against scenarios which are uniquely French: the naif love of American jazz, living off the land's bounty (snails, mayday bouquets, and frog fishing - the only time you'll ever see this in a film), and a complex social order which is both egalitarian and stratified.While the nostalgia is thick, reality is in easy view....the marsh becomes a site for a hypermarche. For me that's just another layer of nostalgia, though - part of the memory of living there for a short time. The last time I visited, even the gas station giveaways were gone. France is ever changing, yet somehow remains the same.

Les Enfants Du Marais is a wonderful tale not only on account of its evocative imagery, atmospheric scenery and the fact that it is populated by genuine characters you know, once knew, or would like to know - it is a welcome and straight-forward reminder of what is important in life. Friendship and love and the simple but ever compelling pleasure found in physical work and play with a purpose; these are the scenarios in which true happiness is enjoyed to its fullest extent. It's not about tree-hugging, sandal-wearing save-the-world ideas but about true freedom -and what we choose to do with it. We get to witness the futility and sad contrivance of pomp and pride but also the power of change and a spot of kindness. Always without judgement yet never without feeling. This movie is not downright sentimental or nostalgic; it just happens to be good in what might be called an old-fashioned way, and it serves up some great laughs along the way. Above all, this is a movie for movie lovers with their hearts and minds in the right place.

A little French gem that wraps you up in the lives of a group of friends in the 1920´s in France. Wonderfully acted and superbly directed, the story meanders gently through a number of seasons tracing their friendship and "amours", interlacing the finely drawn characters and sub-plots with consummate skill. At no time does the story flag, or become convoluted and the ending is simple and uncontrived. The photography is superb and reminiscent of "Manon des Sources"; Eric Cantona is surprisingly good as a champion boxer and even enlarges on his 1996 Selhurst Park performance. You will emerge from this extraordinary film edified and enriched and thanking the heavens that Hollywood isn´t the only place that makes films.

Is it possible to make an exceptional film with miserable people?However, the children of the marsh, ordinary in their surroundings, become extraordinary when one throws them in the midst of civilization, actually in a pretty small French town stuffed with good wealthy "bourgeois".The children of the marsh live in surroundings which could have been one of men living in middle ages, when sickness permitted only a short longevity.It is the Utopia of nature's children, but with at hand all the resorts of civilization...and all its dangers, since the action goes between the two World Wars.It is also the contrast of the solidarity between the children of the marsh and the good-natured selfishness of a prosperous middle class, which at the same time loves and rejects them.