Potted on

Why bother with expensive cat beds? Matisse chose a scruffy old flowerpot for a rest. I decided I'd better grab him in a still moment -- now he's settled in, he careers around like a mad thing, then suddenly keels over and falls asleep.

It was the first event of the summer season this evening -- an open-air showing of an obscure 1984 TV film called Le Ravi. I don't know where they dug it up from. We'd never heard of any of the actors or the director (Maurice Failevic), and the film was in rather poor condition, a kind of halfway house between black and white and dim colour. But it was very topical and went down well with the audience. 

It was filmed not far from here, in and around Cabrespine, and was about farmers in a village feuding over water during a drought. A person from the government arrives with a proposition to build a dam that will provide enough water for everyone. Unable to agree on someone to lead the project, the villagers elect Benoit, a man considered as the village idiot, to preside over their deliberations. There is lots of scheming and trickery, and the film got the habits, behaviour, and accents of these country folk down to a T. An odd film though -- we were all laughing along with it for an hour and a half, and then in the last five minutes it suddenly became a tragedy.