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The first of Claude Berri’s two-film adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s novel The Water of the Hills, Jean de Florette begins in the aftermath of World War I, though it would be easy not to realize it. The Provençal countryside is a vestige of the Old World not yet swept away by the conflict. People still get around mostly by horse and wagon, wear clothes knit by locals, and engage in farming and craftwork methods that have surely remained unchanged for centuries. Even the film’s underlying plot, of farmer Ugolin Soubeyran (Daniel Auteuil) and his uncle, César (Yves Montand), trying to amass land in order to grow carnations, suggests a nod to the tulip mania of the 16th century.

The Soubeyans’ plan to maximize their land holdings rapidly spirals into the kind of hapless but grim crime wave worthy of the Coen brothers. Attempting first to buy out...

By turns, he scandalises and enthrals. Now, the country's most famous actor is leaving home, angry at the imposition of a new 'supertax'. As he seems all set to settle in Belgium, is this really adieu from Gégé?

From which ever angle you view him – literally, metaphorically, physically – Gérard Depardieu is a colossus of Gallic life.

The term most frequently used to describe the bon vivant but volatile embodiment of French popular cinema is "une force de nature".

Even as the off-screen – often drink-fuelled — excesses of Gégé, as he is fondly known, became ever more outrageous, his legion of French fans would shrug and say it was simply Depardieu being Gérard. As he stuck a chubby finger up to convention they laughed. The more undignified the performance (falling off his scooter while drunk, peeing in the aisle of an aircraft) they still laughed: this was Gérard, no mere mortal but a national institution.