Le Haricot (The String Bean) is a 1962 short film (17 minutes) by Edmond Sechan.
A very old woman lives in a tiny, tiny walkup garret in Paris that is really more of a glorified storage closet. She ekes out what is obviously a precarious existence doing piecework, sewing handbags together. One day she takes some beans and puts them in a pan to soak. She goes out, and on the way back she finds a small pot with a dead plant in the dumpster. She throws away the plant but takes the pot and plants a bean in its soil. The bean sprouts, growing into a plant and bringing the woman joy...but it's hard to take care of a plant in a tiny garret with one window.
Other short films by Edmond Sechan with little or no dialogue include The Golden Fish and One-Eyed Men Are Kings.
Tropes:
- And the Adventure Continues: Unbowed by her plant being killed, the old woman picks three beans that were growing off of it, takes them home, and plants them in her pot.
- The Determinator: The woman works very hard to take care of her little plant. When a sheet hung out by whoever lives upstairs obscures the light to her plant, the woman sets it outside. When a pigeon lands next to it and almost eats it, the woman sets the plant out in the hallway of the apartment building on a chair. When that proves unsatisfactory, as the small, shifting beam of light from the attic window isn't enough to nourish the plant, the woman takes it outside and plants it in one of the most famous gardens in the world, the Tuileries. And when some dickhead gardeners kill it, she starts all over again.
- Happy Rain: It starts to rain at the end, as the old woman sets her pot with the beans she's planted on the sill. She pushes the pot out a little more and drops of rain start landing in the pot, indicating that the beans will sprout and there's hope for the future.
- Horrible Housing: The woman lives in a dingy garret which is little more than a kennel, having barely enough space for her bed, her work bench, and a small stove. It doesn't even have running water as she has to go out into the hallway to get water from a public faucet.
- Monochrome to Color: All scenes shot inside the woman's drab, dumpy apartment building are in black and white. However, all the scenes outside, mostly in the Tuileries gardens, are in bright, vivid color. The shot of the sky as the woman looks up is in color, as is the closeup of the bean sprout. This of course emphasizes how the plant and the gardens that the woman strolls through represent life and hope and vitality to the old woman, in contrast to the black and white of her rather grim existence.
- Punch-Clock Villain: The gardeners who uproot and kill the woman's string bean plant. They were just doing their jobs! A bean plant isn't supposed to there among all the gorgeous flower arrangements!
- Silence Is Golden: No dialogue at all in the short, a simple story that doesn't need words to be told.
- Slice of Life: A tale of a very poor woman living in a crappy garret who finds hope and purpose in a single little bean plant.
- Time-Passes Montage: A brief montage shows the plant growing from a sprout poking up out of the dirt to a mature bean plant.
