Germinal
Directed by Claude Berri
Reviewed by Dick Nichols
Nobody except, perhaps, students "doing" French literature reads the novels of 19th century French realist Emile Zola any more, and that's not surprising. It would be difficult to imagine anything less post-modern than L'Assommoir, La Debacle and Germinal, works in which Zola scandalised the drawing rooms of the day with detailed exposures of the vast exploitation underpinning the glitter of France's Third Republic.
A lot of the job Zola did in his time is today done by honest television documentary, and Zola's minutely observed novels would seem prime candidates for presentation on film.
Zola's method was to take some representative capitalist institution — the stock exchange, the newfangled department stores, the Paris markets, the railways — study them intensely and then work them up into a novel. These institutions visually dominate his work, lying, in the words of novelist Henry James, "across the scene like some vast ruminant creature breathing in a cloud of parasites".
In Germinal the "vast ruminant creature" is the coal fields of northern France. It's not surprising that, despite its obvious suitability for the film medium, a century has had to pass before a screen version of Germinal finally appears.
That's because Germinal, with its depiction of life and a strike in the mines, is one of the most powerful denunciations of exploitation that the human imagination has yet produced. For decades it produced a steady supply of recruits to the communist cause; it was banned in many European countries; it was former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's favourite work.
Now — some cinema supremo seems to have judged — it is safe to present Germinal on the screen. After all "communism is dead", conditions in the mines aren't as appalling as in the 1880s (as least in the advanced capitalist world), and Zola's story line is a bit old-fashioned in its mayhem of betrayal, revenge, madness and death.
Yet this film version survives all that. It faithfully conveys the central strengths of the novel: its masterful unravelling of how a strike typically begins, unfolds and is broken; its picture of how relations between the strike leader and the workers change throughout the course of the strike, from suspicion to loyal support to bitter disappointment; the vivid portrayal of a family trying to hold together under appalling trials; the absorbing dialogue between the strike leader, who starts the strike at the wrong time (when coal stocks are high) and the local nihilist (who correctly predicts that the strike will fail, but has no alternative but that of blowing up the mine).
Then there are the details of mining community life — the tub of hot water that gets blacker and blacker as each member of the mining family washes off the coal dust; the local grocer who offers credit in exchange for sexual favours; the village carnival and the miners' pub.
Despite its melodrama, Germinal well conveys Zola's fury at the pitilessness of unconstrained capitalism.