One good turn deserves another: Reciprocity and renewal in Marcel Pagnol’s Merlusse and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers1

Academy Award-winning writer–director Alexander Payne may think otherwise, but the consensus, as the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes has it, is that his 2023 film The Holdovers a satisfying return to form. The film introduced the world to Dominic Sessa, who was only a senior at Deerfield Academy, in Massachusetts, at the time of shooting; earned five Oscar nominations including Best Picture and an Oscar for Da’Vine Joy Randoph’s performance; and returned on its budget of roughly $13 million USD over threefold. Payne’s source material includes the French auteur Marcel Pagnol’s Merlusse (1935). Both films relate goings-on at boarding schools during Christmas breaks, and they take, as their foci, the relationships between curmudgeonly teachers and their mischievous pupils. In this article, I recover the Pagnol–Payne connection. Centring on depictions of gift-giving, I argue that they commercialize only to decommercialize it. This article advances scholarship on what’s surely one of Payne’s finest films and on the representation of Christmas in recent American cinema.