A film lover’s guide to the South of France

French actor and comedian Louis de Funès plays gendarme Ludovic Cruchot in this comedy film series that begins with Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez, which follows Funès’s uptight officer struggling to adjust to life in free-spirited Saint-Tropez after he and his rebellious daughter are forced to relocate from their home in a small French village. The film was such a hit that it spawned five sequels continuing Cruchot’s adventures, closing with Le Gendarme et les Gendarmettes (1982)—the final film of both Funès, who died in 1983, and series director Jean Girault, who died a few months before the film was released.

Marcel Pagnol, born in Aubagne, Bouches-du- Rhône, a stone’s throw from Marseille, rendered the south of France with utter compassion and familiarity. His Marseille Trilogy remains his most enduring tribute to the region, collecting three early masterworks, Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936) that, together, tell an epic story of love and life in Provence. At the time, Pagnol was an established playwright, and the roots of the first two installments of the trilogy are on the stage, with César being the only film of the three to be written for the screen. The three films would establish Pagnol as not just one of France’s greatest writers, but one of its most beloved filmmakers.

Both released in the same year, this diptych of films adapts Marcel Pagnol’s two-part 1962 novel The Water of the Hills (L’Eau des collines). Set in an antiquarian rural France, populated with shepherdesses, poachers, tax collectors and farmers, with plots built on the principles of Greek tragedy, the films offer career-defining performances from Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, and Yves Montand. A huge commercial and critical success, the movies are credited with promoting Provence as a tourist destination internationally.

Although less well known than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), Agnès Varda’s debut feature, set in the seaside town of Sète—where she herself had escaped to during the war—is seen as pioneering the French New Wave. Inspired by William Faulkner’s experimental novel Wild Palms (1939), the film’s dual structure combines the plight of a married couple with that of the locale’s fishermen. “It seemed to me that many ‘literary revolutions’ hadn’t had their equivalent on screen,” she noted. “I was inspired by Faulkner and Brecht in trying to break down narrative constructs, in finding a tone that was at once subjective and objective.” Varda, who was 26 at the time the film was made, a photographer and student of art history, established a luminous film language based on art historical principals. Having allegedly only seen one film (Citizen Kane) before she made La Pointe Courte, Varda also used Bergman-esque overlays before Bergman herself.

Voyeurism is at the heart of Swimming Pool, François Ozon’s postmodern erotic thriller, which nods to Hitchcock and Lynch. A creatively blocked British writer Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) goes to stay at her publisher’s house in Lacoste, and sees her stay interrupted by the arrival of the younger, promiscuous Julie (Ludivine Sagnier). Sarah is repelled, but obsessed, by her sexual exploits, finding material and also becoming an unsettling third.

France’s take on 1961’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s (according to its director Pierre Salvadori) swaps out Audrey Hepburn for the inimitable Audrey Tautou. Tautou plays a sultry gold digger who mistakes timid bartender Jean (Gad Elmaleh) for a millionaire. After drunkenly spending the night together at the luxury Biarritz hotel where Jean works, the two find themselves wrestling with their feelings for one another, while joining forces to scam every rich man and woman on the Côte d’Azur.