Mr. Auteuil's passion project is sincere but not successful, honorable but not alive.

Fanny has a stagy sensibility, but Auteuil displays flashes of genuine, old-school craft.

The characters, the sets, and the scenes all exist to propagate the notion that pleasure derives from repetition and remediation.

If there's a way to render Pagnol successfully, at least in a way that would make another adaptation of this work necessary, Auteuil's mixed bag of rigid emotions and flat visualizations isn't the ideal framework.