Slowly, with a contemplative mien, an old man climbs a gently sloping path on the mountainside. His name is Marcel, Marcel Pagnol, and the place reminds him of a summer long ago… If we know Provence so much, it is largely thanks to this famous playwright, writer and filmmaker, to whom we owe among others The baker’s wife, John of Floretteand Manon of the sources. In the movie The time of secretstaken from the third volume of Pagnol’s childhood memories, we find the latter during the rural holidays before entering high school, between the reunion with local friend Lili and the discovery of love in the person of Isabelle .
It’s Christophe Barratier, specialist in praline nostalgic productions such as The chorists, Suburb 36 and The new button war, which holds the bar of the project. For the record, the first two volumes of Marcel Pagnol’s childhood memories, i.e. My mother’s castle and The glory of my fatherwere successfully adapted by Yves Robert in 1990. Reverently, not only did Christophe Barratier take over the once privileged sunny postcard style, but he also shot in the same house as that of a few years ago. 30 years ago.
A true earthly paradise, as the atheist father of little Marcel remarks, the place and its surroundings are thus filmed according to the bucolic approach.
Charming interpretation
On the periphery of the heartbreaks felt by Marcel, who abandons his faithful friend Lili in favor of the beautiful but capricious Isabelle, his parents experience their own tensions while the father winks at the local baker and the mother takes an interest in the feminist movement (excellent Mélanie Doutey, at the heart of an unfinished subplot). Note that the treatment of a juvenile fight “for honor” may raise eyebrows in the wake of the Will Smith affair.
Relaxed and often languid, the frame serves above all as a pretext for a series of scenes whose old-fashioned charm becomes winded at times, to the point of smelling mothballs.
On the other hand, the interpretation is on the whole charming, that of the children in particular, certain adults sometimes forcing the typed side.
But, again, The time of secrets is clearly a film that knows what audience it is addressing; an audience that probably asks for nothing better than to dream, thanks to all these magnificent Provençal landscapes, of a largely fantasized yesterday. In this, the film fulfills the mandate it gives itself.