MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Germinal’ a Vision of Hope for Workers

Claude Berri’s soaring, magnificent film of Emile Zola’s “Germinal” (at the Royal) cuts right to the movies’ unique, paradoxical power of rendering human misery at its most unrelenting with images of surpassing grandeur and meaning. Pictures don’t get much bleaker than this 158-minute epic saga of the grinding existence of 19th-Century French coal miners--but they don’t get much more beautiful either.

Berri and his formidable yet understated cinematographer, Yves Angelo, aided by Jean-Louis Roque’s subtle yet stirring score, bring a unifying, majestic lyricism to their contrasting views of the few ultra-rich and the many desperately poor. “Germinal,” France’s official entry in the Oscars, glows with the humanism and passion for authenticity that were Zola’s hallmarks, and is a worthy successor to Berri’s similarly powerful “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Springs.”

The story is set roughly a century ago, but it’s actually unfolding, with varying degrees of severity, around the world right now. As a leader in the international Naturalist literary movement, Zola believed that the destinies of most people, especially the poor, were dictated--and usually harshly--by environment.

In any event, the Maheu family and their friends and neighbors, who labor mightily at the Voreux pit in Northern France, could scarcely be more trapped. Times are bad, which means that the miners must concentrate on loading their carts as fully and as often as possible at the expense of properly securing the mine’s tunnels with timber; if they complain, they risk losing all payment for timbering.

Maheu (Gerard Depardieu) and his wife, Maheude (Miou-Miou), have seven children, more than they can support, but doubtlessly religion--and quite possibly ignorance as well--have made birth control out of the question. Besides, as the community’s resident anarchist (Laurent Terzieff, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Lenin) remarks, “Capitalism allows workers only to eat dry bread and make babies.”

But now pay cuts threaten to take away the bread and to starve the babies. A quiet, reasonable man, Maheu, a foreman, emerges as the leader of a strike movement after management has refused his modest plea for enough pay to provide daily bread.

What keeps cuts between the Maheu’s barren table and that of the mine’s managing director (Jacques Dacqmine) with its elaborate, abundant fare from seeming heavy-handed is that Zola--and Berri--are able to perceive that the haves are actually vulnerable to the same economic system as the have-nots.

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Zola may have had a passion for social reform, but thankfully it is tempered by a healthy pessimism that keeps it from seeming like self-righteous ax-grinding. “Germinal,” which has too profound a vision of life to be a mere message movie, is no Marxist tract--just a simple urging for the privileged to share more generously with the needy, i.e., you shouldn’t be eating brioche when your workers can’t afford bread.

In an actual abandoned mining community, restored for the film down to the last detail, Berri has gathered a large and superb ensemble cast that includes Jean Carmet as the Maheu grandfather stricken with black lung, Judith Henry as their grown daughter and Jean-Roger Milo as her hot-tempered, homely suitor.

Triggered by the arrival of the idealistic, dangerously naive, labor-organizing machinist Etienne Lantier (Renaud), the plight of the Maheus and everyone else at Voreux goes from bad to the unspeakably worse, culminating in multiple tragedies characteristic of ancient Greek drama.

Since “Germinal” is so determinedly grim and the socioeconomic ills and injustices it depicts so depressingly familiar, one might well ask why one should submit to it--and submission, make no mistake about it, is precisely what is required. The answer is that we can see ourselves in the film’s people and be moved by their plight, buoyed by their warm, earthy spirit and thrilled by how vividly Berri has brought the past back to life. “Germinal” offers only the most tentative note of hope, but that it was made in the first place is in itself an act of affirmation.

‘Germinal’

Renaud: Etienne Lantier Gerard Depardieu: Maheu Miou-Miou: Maheude Jean Carmet: Bonnemort Judith Henry: Catherine Maheu Jean-Roger Milo: Chaval

A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Renn Productions presentation. Director Claude Berri. Executive producer Pierre Grunstein. Screenplay by Berri, Arlette Langmann; based on the novel by Emile Zola. Cinematographer Yves Angelo. Editor Herve De Luze. Costumes Sylvie Gautrelet, Caroline De Vivaise, Bernadette Villard. Music Jean-Louis Roques. Art directors/set designers Thanh At Hoang, Christian Marti. Sound mixer Dominique Hennequin. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 38 minutes.

Times guidelines: Some nudity, sex, language, violence; complex adult themes. Scenes of nudity and lovemaking matter-of-fact rather than exploitative.