Germinal

"Germinal" is a vivid, colorful, eloquent rendering of how the life of mine workers was in Europe in late 19th century. It is also a powerful illustration of how a strike could come about in that time, and how difficult - almost hopeless - it could seem for those dirt-poor people to try and improve their miserable life conditions. Of course, the contrast with the bourgeoisie is striking and thought-provoking. Depardieu (as Maheu) is, as usual, a giant figure, and most other actors are also very convincing. One question that remains when you saw it all is : can you really change a society's deep, unfair structure without violence?

I've never been interested in costume drama's that deal with 18th and 19th century high society. As I once said before in another review: "There is just too much gold foil, too much ugly wigs and pompous costumes, too much over the top decors, just too much of everything that I detest in it" and I really haven't changed my idea about that so far. But when I'm able to see a movie that deals with the life of the ordinary man in that time period, than I'm always willing to give it a chance.

"Germinal" is such a movie that deals with life of the ordinary man and woman. It tells the story of the coal miners in the region of Lille, in the North of France at the end of the 19th century. They are all poor, they work too hard in awful conditions and they don't get paid what they deserve by the bosses who only want to get richer and richer by doing whatever they can so they won't have to pay a cent to their workforce. Of course the miners aren't happy with that situation and when they get into contact with two men who both want to change the situation, one a communist union man and the other one an anarchist, the miners soon go on a strike, with some very unpleasant consequences as a result...

What first went through my mind while seeing this one, was that this movie has a lot of similarities with "Daens" (1993), the Belgian movie that tells the story of the poor textile workers in Flanders at the end of the 19th century. It's the same time period and both regions are only about 60 miles or 90 kilometers apart. If you like to see what life in the European industrial regions at the end of the 19th century was like, than both movies are certainly something you shouldn't miss.

What I liked about the movie as well was that it had a good pace and that it stayed interesting from the beginning until the end. It could have been very easy for the director to make a movie about this subject that lasted 5 or 6 hours, but than it might have lost much of its power. Now, you get a pretty good idea of what life in that region during the industrial revolution was like, without having to struggle through too many details that don't really contribute to the story. Next to the good story, I must say that I also liked the acting. Even though Gérard Depardieu hasn't always made the best choices of movies to play in, I always like him in the role of the ordinary man, the underdog that has to fight the system. I liked him in the mini-series "Les Misérables" as well and he has the same kind of role in this movie. The other actors did a fine job as well, even though I have to admit that I don't really know anyone of them, except for Bernard Fresson perhaps. All in all this is a very good adaptation of the novel by Émile Zola. It does exactly what I expected from it and that's why I give it at least a 7.5/10.

A straightforward, generally fast-moving, recounting of a gripping social struggle, portrayed without any special effects for special effects' sake (though I think there was plenty of unobtrusive special effects), with the emphasis always on the dramatic line; good acting by all concerned; generally plain, clear photography that served the story-telling and not some "artsy" vision--all these added up, for me, to an enthuasiastic vote of "ten." Cannot praise this film enough. No, it's not some summit of art, but it's a textbook example of how to tell a story, keep the audience's attention, and honor the dramatic basis of the project instead of indulging in "artistic" whims and triviliaties that will appear dated in five or six years.

I'll be watching this one again. (By the way, I found the distant shot of the striking workers marching across the plain especially moving. And I had the feeling throughout the film that this was how things really looked at that terrible period of French, and European, history.)

Prior to this most recent cover of Emile Zola's novel by Claude Berri, they were various renderings on the silver screen before. A silent version was shot in 1913 and remains difficult to watch. In 1962, Yves Allégret's version of Zola's sprawling novel followed very closely the thread of the storytelling which came to the front while the descriptions of the working-classes and the upper classes took a back seat. 30 years later, Berri got down to a new transposition of the novel to the screen to locate her in the vein of French heritage. Developed by the Mitterrand government, this trend spawned films which were meant to be a popular quality cinema facing American blockbusters and to show French culture in literature at key-moments in French history. This movement was at its peak at the dusk of the eighties and the dawn of the nineties with "Jean De Florette", "Manon Des Sources" (1986), "Cyrano De Bergerac" (1990) or "Madame Bovary" (1991). Generally, these films were financially profitable but weren't up to scratch from an artistic perspective. "Germinal" belongs to this category. Probably the most famous installment in the Rougon-Macquart saga, "Germinal" is also one of the most potent French novels ever written. It was a perilous task to transpose it to the screen and Berri partially did well his job. His film follows very closely the staple framework of the novel and only keeps its main installments including some grisly ones (the sequence of the castration). Hence a simplified and watered-down version in which certain moments are clumsily linked up. Overrall, Berri's piece of work joins the list of films derived from novels in which to be as faithful as possible to the basic work can hamper the artistic potential of the film.

Before being a filmmaker or an actor, Berri is especially labeled as a producer and for "Germinal" which was partly sponsored by French government, he had a Pharaonic budget at his disposal to reconstitute a prickly era of French history. Lavish costumes, an authentically built pit village are clear signs of this budget. Places, manners and the living standards of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie which encompassed deep inequalities are faithfully depicted in a hard-hitting way. There's a noticeable detail during the party: the fight between the cocks is an evident metaphor of the class struggle. A blatant gap between the stark pit village, especially the dour house of the Maheu and the lascivious residences of the Gregoire is enhanced by a photography with evocative colors. Berri faithfully captured Zola's novel and his budget was up to scratch to the demands of the novel. But as I mentioned above, Berri is first and for most of a producer. As a filmmaker, his job remains limited to make him go in the restrained circle of the seminal contemporary French filmmakers. Zola's ground-breaking sweep also encompassed a plea in favor of the working classes who lived in squalor and a condemnation of the bourgeoisie in their posh universe. These features are perceptible in Berri's film but that's all. The director contents himself to shoot the watershed and momentum moments of the book without developing his own perception or bringing his personal touch. Berri is unable to create a cinematographic language to render the strength of the most harrowing or blackest moments in the novel. That's why his directing has an academic feel. So, the most blackest aspects of Zola's novel vanish on the screen. In the sequences after the strike, the writer depicted in an incredible harsh style, the Maheu's tawdry conditions and their bigger misery caused by the fiasco of the strike but one doesn't really feel this misery. Then, on the scene when Maigrat the greedy shopkeeper gets emasculated, Zola wanted to raise the wild side of the miners, especially women and it's not palpable in spite of the commendable efforts of the actresses.

The cast gathers a bevy of actors who are representative of French cinema but certain choices are debatable for different reasons. Renaud, one of the most popular and finest contemporary French singers plays his game well as the lead Etienne Lantier but he was a little too old for the role. On the paper, Lantier was about 20-25 years old and Renaud was in his forties when he acted. Beside him, Gérard Depardieu is physically Maheu but his character is psychologically subdued than in the book. The frail Miou-Miou wasn't the ideal actress to epitomize the stout and weakened Maheude. But Laurent Terzieff, a very ambitious thespian only appears for about a quarter of an hour in the whole film but effectively taps his little underwritten part. He just has to pronounce little lines to unveil his great skills of actor. The same goes for Jean Carmet whose character name and moniker, "Bonnemort" (good death) took an ironic dimension when he passed away shortly after the movie reached the streets. Jean Roger Milo was ideally cast as coarse, hairy Chaval.

I don't want to demean Berri. His movie is thoroughly watchable but it is proof that Zola's work needs something else on the screen. His simplified cover hardly does justice to Zola's potent cry of revolt. It is at best mildly entertaining and for the non- speaking French viewers, it can be gratifying but for the French viewers who are Zola insiders, it might be a little frustrating. But it didn't stop this epic movie to ride high in the French box-office and to line Berri's pockets.

In 1867, Karl Marx theorized the struggle of the proletarian masses in economical words. But the emotional resonance rang from Emile Zola's "Germinal", 18 years after "The Capital" and the impact was so strong that at the death of Zola in 1902, a group of coal-miners marched during his funeral shouting "Germinal".

Scholars look as it as a masterpiece of naturalism, a genre where Zola was the figurehead. His method consisted in collecting information from knowledge, then researches, on-the-spot investigations (as far as going down into the mine for "Germinal"). While he could collect notebooks with hundred pages worth of information, Zola insisted that the lion share of his story was the result of his own imagination and intuition, mirroring even his old friend Flaubert's conviction that a writer should also learn to make notebooks to better despise them.

Personally, I do trust Zola's approach as I discover in the book characterization as rich and labyrinthine as a mine's gallery, from Lantier, the idealistic 'troublemaker', Maheu the quiet family man, Maheude, his hot-tempered wife or the brutish, alcoholic Chaval. Zola's book might say more about the torments of the working class (whose condition history slightly rose above slavery) than any documentary, and Zola's stance during the Dreyfus Affair cleared any doubt about the man's humanitarian motives.

And "Germinal" is humanitarian as it reveals deep and disturbing truths without romanticizing the coal-miners: idealistic, rude, sensitive, ugly, or disillusioned. Lantier, portrayed by Renaud, embodies the outsider's perspective, the most likely to be the spark that ignites the wrath, as people from the mine are too alienated by their routine they can't see the machines they became. Yet there are no villains either, as the bourgeois are portrayed with similar impartial exactitude, just failing to inspire pity because they can eat. Movie-wise, "Germinal" is no Eisenstein material.

Indeed, after the storm is gone, everything gets back to normal, Zola's final paragraph seems to predict that the next time will be the right one, but history didn't echo Zola's optimism although the prediction didn't necessarily imply for the last century. The problem with Claude Berri's film is that it is one century too late, and we have enough perspective to accept the ending as a defeat, the voice-over narration doesn't cancel the downer feeling. But who said you couldn't make great film out of a failure?

Berri proved to be a lucid painter of human corruption, judging by his two masterpieces "Jean de Florette" and "Manon des Sources". And in "Germinal", he reminds us that the worst human traits transcend classes. One of the key characters is Chaval, a brute infatuated with Maheu's daughter Catherine. Jean-Roger Milo plays with gusto the street-smart man who's no less idealistic than the next schmuck but whose soul is already rotten by life's meaninglessness. Judith Henry, as Catherine, is sweet and submissive as going down the mine lowered her self-esteem in the process and made her believe she deserved Chaval more than the decent Lantier.

The matriarch, (played by Miou-Miou) isn't the voice of consolation either, she resents Catherine because she now belongs to Chaval and so does her wage. That's one of the subtle lessons of "Germinal", coal-miners are as driven by money as capitalists, maybe more because it's a matter of life and death. The company gives them a house (the 'corons' in the North of France are an architectural heritage of the industrial era), and enough money not to die from hunger. They make children, as many arms to work but as many mouths to feed, stability depends on this fragile balance. But the film, following Zola's method and echoing the didacticism of John Ford's "Grapes of Wrath", explains why the strikes start.

Minders are paid for the coal, but not the timbers they use to shore up the shafts, so they put less spirit in the timbering, causing more accidents. When the company pays the shoring, the wages for coal are reduced, leading to an even less profitable situation. On an intellectual level, "Germinal" works, so well in fact that the film might be less impressive when it gets spectacular. Indeed, Berri is never as efficient as during intimate or subtle interactions, when the rich daughter Cecile doesn't give the whole sweet bun to Maheude's children, only the half of it, it mirrors the way rich people hardly renounce their share.

Miou-Miou is never as effective as in the quieter moments, her weird grunts at some tragic moments made me turn down the volume so my neighbors wouldn't get the wrong idea of the type of movies I watched. Renaud is a natural, he was the reason Berri wanted to make the film like Coluche for "Tchao Pantin" and Yves Montand for the Provence two-parter, as the singing Vox Populi, Renaud was meant to play Lantier. And Gérard Depardieu plays the brave old chap in a role that (I guess) wasn't too demanding. Some scenes are rather unnecessary as they had nothing to the big picture and all the "big" scenes with crowds of workers marching over the hills say less than the infamous cadaver's mutilation that contributed to the film's most shocking image.

I won't spoil the scene but the look on the man's faces says a lot about the way things get easily out of control and it says something more about human nature. Berri adapted two movies from Marcel Pagnol, s about the basic need for water but saying so much more about the unlimited vileness of greed. "Germinal" works in a reverse way, on the surface, it might feel like a hymn for dignity, but maybe it's a film that also shows how far people go, when driven by some force as desperate and uncontrollable as hunger, to show, or to warn us.