More than a decade after the collapse of Berlin Wall, Communism is often viewed as one of the greatest evils of 20th Century, or at least, one of the more discredited ideologies in the history of political thought. However, Communism could have never made such impact without being embraced by large masses of impoverished people who saw its vague promise of better future as the only viable alternative to their often unbearable present. Conditions that proved such a fertile ground to revolutionary socialism are the subject of Germinal, 1993 French period drama directed by Claude Berri.
The plot is based on the novel by Emile Zola (1840-1902), French author best known for his role in the Dreyfus affair. However, in the history of literature, Zola is best known as the creator of literary style that would afterwards be known as "naturalistic" – faithfully expressing reality in its most prosaic, ugliest and unpleasant forms. Zola believed that the writers had to employ same methods as scientists - carefully observe their subjects even in their most sordid details and later make turn their conclusions into literary work. In mid-1880s he travelled to Northern France in order to inquire about conditions of people employed in the coal mines. Appalled by the poverty, despair and general misery he had witnessed in the mines and around them, Zola wrote Germinal, novel that would later become not only one of the literary classics, but also one of the tools of Communist indoctrination in 20th Century. The novel was also turned into film three times, with the 1993 version being one of the most expensive productions in recent French cinema history.
The plot of the film deals with the community of coal miners living near Franco-Belgian border in the second half of 19th Century. Among those miners is Maheu (played by Gerard Depardieu) and his wife (played by Miou Miou), whose family lives in a small cottage, and whose children, regardless of their gender or age, are forced to join him in the pits in order to have some food on the table. Work in the pits is not only hard, unpleasant and dirty business, but also a dangerous one, because greedy owners refuse to pay for timbering, thus allowing numerous accidents and tragedies. The wages are so low that the families can't even afford to move and seek their fortune elsewhere, while the owners live in unimaginable luxury. The prospects for the miners are looking even worse with decreasing coal prices that would mean even lower wages. Situation in the mines seems to change with the arrival of another miner - young ex-machinist Etienne Lantier (played by Renaud), who is better educated, more class-conscious and wants to incite his comrades to take matters into their own hands and do something to improve their living conditions. The best and the only way to do it is strike, but the miners' disunity and lack of leadership would result in violence and mass tragedy.
Director and co-writer Claude Berri, whose father used to be a coal miner, obviously invested a lot of energy in this film, and in the two and half hours of its running time no effort is spared to show us the ugly reality of capitalism in its purest, most exploitative form, unchecked by trade unions, minimum wage, labour laws, welfare state and other stuff that are taken for granted in our more enlightened age. In that, Berri is helped by the efforts of Depardieu and his partner Miou Miou - both actors obviously drawing inspiration from their blue-collar family backgrounds. Berri also shows us how these appalling conditions - with family members forced to take a bath in front of each other - lead to various forms of social pathology, like alcoholism, promiscuity, and, finally, violence that would explode in its most cruel forms and be shown by Berri's camera in graphic detail. The picture shown in this film is powerful, but also very depressive and disturbing one, yet it grabs the viewers by the throat and forces him to watch all this misery until equally depressive end. The ending, which looks somewhat abrupt, is also the weakest part of the film and it shouldn't have contained monotonous and, in the context of this film unnecessary, narration of Zola's text. But the worst thing in this film is the lack of modern context - Germinal, although probably still very relevant to less fortunate masses in the Third World sweatshops and post-Communist countries, can't reach the audience in the First World countries with their economies based on mass consumption and where the poverty belongs to the margins of society. And we can't truly be affected by Germinal while knowing that the cure was in some ways worse than the disease.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on August 2nd 2002)
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Movie URL: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/51980-germinal?language=en-US
Critic: AA
