This weekend I went to the movies with my friend, Julie. We saw “Bergers” a film about a man from Quebec who moves to Provence to be a shepherd. He quickly learns that it is not the idyllic career that he once imagined it to be. The job is incredibly difficult as he learns to herd sheep, look after their well-being, and exists in a both strikingly beautiful and strikingly violent setting. Along the way, he also falls in love with a civil servant who joins his journey as they eventually guide a flock of sheep across the Alps. I really enjoyed the film and it was a visually gorgeous one that featured many shots of the green Alps against the blue sky. It brought me back to reading Heidi as a child and made me really want to go on a hike. It also made me think a lot about the relationship to nature here.
A lot of the images of Provence center around nature. When you search the region online, you’ll often receive images of large stretches of lavender, or lush green vineyards, or some of the port towns that look out at a sparkling Mediterranean ocean. As I mentioned in my last post, one of Aix-en-Provence’s most celebrated artists is Cézanne, famed for his paintings of the provincial landscape and Mount Sainte-Victoire. His paintings are on signs all around the city and depicted on one of the passageways to the main street. Nature is a huge part of the narrative of Provence and that of this city in particular. I just finished taking a Literature and Cinema of Provence class where many of the works we read and watched included a rapport with the environment. Most obviously, we read and watched “L’homme qui plantait des arbres” (aka “The Man Who Planted the Trees”) by Jean Giono which tells the story of a shepherd (apparently I’m on a shepherd-focused media kick recently) who brings his town to life by planting trees every day. It’s a story of selfless labor and the environment.
Beautiful Cassis which is a beautiful coastal town that is a bus ride away from Aix!
Ultimately in the same way that Hugh Grant once said, “If you look for it…love actually is all around,” if you look for it, narratives of nature actually are all around. Are these images often romanticized ones? Absolutely! Is there still reality within them such as in the movie we started this post with? Yes, “Bergers” showed these glorious green mountains, but it also showed lightning storms and some 3000 sheep, and the way that shepherds were left to their own devices when it came to wolves. Nature is in many stories here, and when you step outside, you can often find yourself being a part of this narrative.