Germinal Reviews

A splendid evocation of Emile Zola's most celebrated novel, this film adaptation by director Claude Berri chronicles the tragic aftermath of French industrialization, as miners and bourgeoisie do battle for economic survival. Berri's conscientious fidelity to the 1885 novel was probably inevitable--it's virtually a sacred text in France--but the film nevertheless emerges as a lament for the ruin of the modern European Left. Northern France, during an economic slump in the 1860s. The massive Voreux mine, where modern steam-engines and cast-iron machinery combine incongruously with horse-drawn carts and rickety wooden towers, is first seen at night, through the eyes of an unemployed mechanic from the south of France, Etienne Lantier (Renaud). He gets a job through Maheu (Gerard Depardieu), a stalwart worker from a longtime mining family, and secures a room when local innkeeper Rasseneur (Jean-Pierre Bissou) recognizes him as a fellow socialist. Also living at the inn is Souvarine (Laurent Terzieff), a radical anarchist with an apocalyptic view of labor's role. Maheu shares cramped, dingy living quarters with seven children, his ailing father (Jean Carmet), and his wife Maheude (Miou-Miou). All able-bodied family members work in the mine except Maheude, who's nursing an infant. The family's circumstances are so dire that she's forced to beg from lecherous shopkeeper Maigrat (Gerard Croce) and from the ostentatiously prosperous Gregoires, who live off their shares in the mine. An explosion and cave-in cripples Maheu's son, and anger builds as management decides to cut the miners' pay. Lantier and Maheu win the workers' support for a strike. Meanwhile, escalating tension between Lantier and the boorish Chaval (Jean-Roger Milo) over the affections of young Catherine (Judith Henry), Maheu's daughter, is paralleled with the social conflict. After weeks of misery, the strike shows no sign of succeeding. The strikers set out to halt operations at a neighboring mine, where Chaval and Catherine have gone to work. Leading an attack on the mine, they succeed in closing it down, and the emerging scabs are violently taunted; Maigrat's store is looted, and the shopkeeper falls to his death and is castrated by the mob. The gendarmes arrive and Etienne is briefly forced into hiding. Turning to the army for protection, the mine-owners attempt to re-open Voreux with Belgian labor. The soldiers fire on a crowd of strikers, killing Maheu. Facing a bleak winter, some miners, including Catherine and Etienne, return to the pits. Souvarine, refusing to accept defeat, sabotages a vital piece of machinery, flooding the mine and trapping many workers inside. Lantier kills Chaval in a fight underground; he's then rescued, but not before Catherine dies in his arms. Maheude, who has now lost a husband, two daughters, and a son, is forced to go to work in the mine. A chastened Lantier leaves the region, reflecting that social justice--like the seeds now germinating beneath the fields--must inevitably flourish. Straightforward, sweeping, and painterly, Berri's movie--the most expensive made in France to date--is political cinema of a decidedly traditional kind, recalling Bertolucci's lush brand of socialist realism rather than the Brechtian meta-films espoused and made by Godard and Gorin. The location shooting, particularly around the gargantuan mineworks, is often magnificent, while the staging of a rustic local fair suggests canvasses by Brueghel, who lived just over the border. If Depardieu as Maheu was an inevitable casting coup, it's a remarkably successful one: his economical performance is persuasive and moving; Miou-Miou is equally formidable. In an otherwise uniformly strong ensemble, only Renaud, a pop singer in his screen debut, seems somewhat out of place. (While most actors seem to have been chosen partly for their resemblance to Zola's characters--Judith Henry, in particular, looks exactly as Catherine is described in the novel--there are also a few sly hints in casting and make-up: Souvarine looks very much like a young Lenin, while Maigrat resembles Pierre Laval.) Unlike Zola's politically ambivalent book, which constructs an economic conflict in which "all are guilty," Berri's film allies itself decisively with the workers--the agonies of cuckolded bourgeois Hennebeau (Jacques Dacqmine) are downplayed, as is the savagery of the mob. The screenplay, co-written by Berri and Arlette Langmann, nevertheless does an admirable job of condensing the sprawling novel for the screen. Although its historical analysis, like the novel's, is arguably naive, its subtextual take on the collapse of the contemporary French Left is unmistakable and trenchant: the miners' strategic clashes and internecine struggles, together with the mine-owners' self-serving arguments about market prices and competition, should resonate with anyone familiar with French politics of the 1980s and early '90s. The overall effect is tremendously poignant. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations.)