Germinal

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.)

"Germinal" (French, 1993): This EPIC story, adapted from Emile Zola's novel and put to film by Claude Berri (director of "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of the Spring"), is the gritty depiction of hard working coal miners in 1800's France, trying to eek out a living and better their lives by forming a labor union. Loaded with issues rising through the Industrial Age, Gerard Depardieu, Miou-Miou, Judith Henry, and Jean-Roger Milo deservedly star in a frighteningly bleak setting, with ominous musical scoring, and the relentless, black dust of coal. Comparisons to the wealthy mine owners lives, opulent and very isolated from their industry's realities, are blatant and clear. Zola wanted some economic and moral balance – even just a little – and set about depicting a situation that could not be denied.

Tackling a book such as Germinal is a mammoth task - and one that I always thought was extremely difficult to transfer onto the big screen.

There are two ways you can do it, keep it simple or explore everything and bore the audience to death. You can see here that the director has decided to keep the story as simple and straightforward as possible.

This means there are a few gaping holes in the film, as it ignores some of the intricacies of the story and many of the sub-plots which punctuate the story and add to the feel of the book.

In one sense he succeeds, as the tempo of the film is high and it rattles along at a fair pace, not reading like a 2 and a half hour story.

But the major drawback of this tactic is that Germinal ends up looking like a simplistic noble workers versus the greedy bosses story, when the novel is anything but that.

Scorn is poured on both sides with equal contempt by Zola, and plenty of sympathy is given to some of the "wealthy" protaganists in the book.

Having said this, I do understand that in order to keep the film from turning into a 4 hour behemoth, you need to try and keep it as simple as possible.

On the whole, however, it is pretty well acted and the art direction is utterly breathtaking. The villages, the pits, the landscapes, the mines are fabulously shot. You really can feel the poverty oozing from every inch of the screen.

Gerard Depardieu (Maheu) and Renaud (Ettiene) put in some pretty convincing turns but feel that Jean-Roger Milo rather over-egged Chaval, turning him into some pseudo incredible hulk type character who is incapable of speaking normally. Judith Henry also seems a little to young and fresh faced to play Catherine.

I think I let my interpretation of the book cloud my judgement, and as a result I was disappointed because I expected more from the film than I should have.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reducing Zola's masterful but monstrously long novel to a movie is the problem that Claude Berri does not seem to have resolved. He sticks close to Zola's text, which means that we get lots of undeveloped snippets of what were very developed scenes in the novel. If you don't know the novel, this probably causes a certain sense of confusion. If you do know the novel, and it is well-known in France, you have the sense that you are just skimming the surface. I think that Berri would have done better to be less faithful to the novel, or at least less comprehensive in his adaptation of it.

That said, there are most certainly good things in this movie. Miou Miou delivers, in my opinion, the movie's best performance. No, she is not at all the earth mother that Zola's la Meheude is. But she acts with her face, saying far more with a facial gesture than many words would have said. In a movie that skims over a lot of material, that makes for very effective acting. Depardieu is sometimes very good - physically he is perfect for the part of le Maheu - sometimes he seems to deliver the lines without thinking about them. The actor who plays Souvarine is very striking.

The cinematography is nice, but does not convey a lot of what Zola emphasizes in the novel: the heat and lack of space in the mine tunnels, etc.

A good movie if you haven't read the novel; a disappointing one if you have.

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.