Germinal
by Claude Berri
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Product details
Actor: Jean Carmet, Jean-Roger Milo, Judith Henry, Miou-Miou, Renaud (II)Director: Claude Berri
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, NTSC, Subtitled
Running Time: 158 minutes
Release Date: 1996-02-13
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Studio: Sony Pictures
VHS Movie Reviews of Germinal
Movie Review: Breathtaking
Summary: 5 Stars
This is truly a wonderful film if you wish to get a sense for class conflict in nineteenth-century Europe. I regularly show the film to my European history classes and believe it is high time that a DVD version be released.Movie Review: The germination of coal miner unionization in 19th-century France
Summary: 3 Stars
Germination is the sowing and sprouting of an idea,hence we come to GERMINAL,a sprawling adaptation of an Emile Zola novel concerning the fledgling Coal Miner fight for worker unionization and fair employee treatment under burgeoning socialist thought in 19th century France.For information ,alone,this Claude Berri (LEAN de FLORETTE) epic is worth at least one viewing.The film seems massive in scope and impressive at first with it's theme for equality,liberty and justice;but the film suffers terribly in defining and developing all of the character subplots that even at over 2-1/2 hours the viewer will be left feeling as cold as the dank dark mines themselves.The pace of the film is ponderously slow and time frames are extremely unclear as they shift without warning.Characters are picked up and then dropped,only to reappear later after the intro of 100 additional ones!!! You will scratch your head and say "Now who was that?" The main focus,if there is one,is the family of thirteen (with Miou-Miou and Depardieu as the parents)whose very existence depends on each member contributing wages from working in the mines in order to scrape by.Death and black lung is an everyday occurance.The rich bosses live fat while the worker starves.This certainly is not a new theme,as this still goes on in the 21st century;but director Berri accurately details the plight of the working poor of the time almost too accurately in order to make the film move at all.Just as Berri did in JEAN de FLORETTE,he has chosen an extremely liesurely pace to tell the narrative,but with much of the film underground in near darkness,one longs for the relief of a scene or two of daylight! Of course,this is the point of the movie,but that doesnot mean that it makes for pleasurable viewing.Perhaps GERMINAL would have benefitted more as a mini-series to allow for more character development.The film is only on vhs currently and is an excellent print with large yellow subtitles for very easy reading.
Companion films on a similar subject would be MATEWAN ,NORMA RAE and REDS.
Movie Review: SIX STARS
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the great ones. Every bit as riveting as "Shindler's List", it is not about the Jews and The Holocaust, but a less immediate cause - coal miners in France in 1884. Deserves to be one of France's top ten films of all time. Costing $30 million, it's worth every penny. At two hours, 38 minutes, it never lost me for a second. I sat enthralled, immersed in the poverty, meanness, and ugliness of the world Berri's camera shows us. The extras he used are actual descendants of the original striking coal miners Emile Zola based his novel on. The title means germination, as in the workers planted a seed of unions and justice which would in fact sprout in the 20th century. Gerard Depardieu was really part of a large ensemble cast, each with great parts. It was especially good in showing us that there are no easy winners, or answers, in the contrast of rich and poor. The poor would be just like the rich if they had the chance, and enough to eat does not necessarily bring happiness. There was romance here, and violence, sharp and quick, darkness and light, sumptious dinner scenes, and dirty people in dank mines. This should not be buried in obscurity. A great story, passionately toldMovie Review: Sprawling adaptation!
Summary: 5 Stars
As you know Emile Zola was the authentic father of the realism in literature. His portraits are so lucidly depicted as you were watching a film. His impeccable and descriptive style is so impressive that it is nothing difficult to get into his world.
Claude Berri had gotten an excellent rapport previously with Depardieu in Jean de Florette and Manon of Spring. In this time we will witness of the rural drama of an impoverished family leaded by Depardieu, a coal miner who begins to politicize around his fellow partners.
Somehow this novel was an anticipatory of the turbulent days to come only thirty years after, having been written in 1884.
Monumental photography and brutal realism. A winner film all the way.
It is a true mystery this movie has not translated unto DVD format.
Movie Review: How poverty and hunger will drive people to extremes
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is based on Emile Zola's classic (and perhaps best) novel. It's a bleak story about underpaid miners and their families living in poverty while their employer makes excuses for not being able to pay them better, all the while living in wealth with his own family. The film does a brilliant job of showing this contrast between the squalor of the miners' class and the lavish lifestyle of the upper-class which employs them. The miners' work is very dangerous down there and sooner or later there are accidents and people die. Finally the miners can take it no more and they revolt, they form a strike, they even "trash" the mining plant. But this only makes matters worse. A warning to the sensitive: there are a few extremely unpleasant scenes in this film, including a dead man having his genitals cut off and stuffed down his mouth; and a pretty young woman choked to death by a murderous old imbecile. This is a disturbing, moving, enlightening, gripping film about social injustice and inequality, and when you see how these poor people lived in old Victorian times, you will shake your head with disbelief at some of the scenes, and you will learn to count your blessings. You will also feel empathy for the plight of the poor miners and their families.
David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"
Summary of Germinal
Emile Zola's novel of a rural mine town and a perilous worker's strike becomes a big-budget film of grit and torment in Germinal. The first half of the movie captures a world just this side of prison where whole families work in the Voreux mines with a daily dose of coal dust covering their skins and clogging their minds. Escapes are rare: a drink at the company bar or a carnival. An outsider provokes talk of a strike, something the failing owners want as well. When the workers revolt, it becomes a monster. While true to Zola's passion for the worker and social change, the movie cannot recover from the operatic drama that turns the action into mere motion, failing to draw in the audience (although this is an impressive-looking film, with Voreux passing as the real thing). Viewers will be moved by the workers' plight, the daily grime that they must rinse away, and their efforts to instill a normal life in this industrial hell--and will surely learn to appreciate their own jobs, whatever the inadequacies. --Doug ThomasFrench Video
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