The Visitors Take Sarasota

• Share

(2 of 3)

GATT chat is fine around the swimming pool, but at the box office the film's the thing. And in the international market French films, with their acerbic, worldly-wise tone, have been pushed aside not only by Hollywood but also by the sweeping sentimentality of Cinema Paradiso (Italy) and Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico). The few French films that have broken through of late have been, for the most part, period dramas: Tous les Matins du Monde, Cyrano, Claude Berri's two-part Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. So the big news in Sarasota was the North American premiere of Berri's adaptation of the Emile Zola novel Germinal, with an imposing cast headed by Gerard Depardieu, the one French actor with worldwide heft and clout.

The Quality Merchandise label is stamped all over Germinal, an operatic dirge in a minor key. For 160 claustrophobic minutes, Berri locks viewers inside Zola's 19th century coal mines, where death by cave-in seems only marginally more horrible than the 12-hr.-a-day life sentences that are the miner's jobs. In this determinist bleakness, where is the lamplight of hope? Perhaps in the community of workers, united against the bosses? Dream on. The miners' lives are so brutal that they must brutalize other miners. The taste of power makes them as barbaric as the mineowners. The workers have lost the halo of the victim; their hands will be soiled by blood as well as coal dust.

Except for a few scenes of adulterous frivol among the ruling class, Berri is remarkably fair-minded in doling out bad hands to workers and bosses; both groups are trapped in a system they can't control. But because his and Zola's theme is that the Industrial Revolution ground human beings into human beasts, Berri can't mine the very individual perfidy that was at the heart of Jean de Florette; fate is simply a less interesting villain than a man driven crazy by another man's goodness. Germinal, with its climactic mine disaster and bitter lamentations, is finally buried in its fidelity to its source.

In period films, the French pit the upper class against workers or peasants. In films set in modern-day France, the battle is often between the native-born and the immigrant. The influx of North Africans to the Paris area has already been starkly depicted in Bertrand Tavernier's L.627 (about drug dealers) and Bertrand Blier's Un Deux Trois -- Soleil! (squatters in the desolate suburbs). Half a dozen of Sarasota's 20 new feature films sent their characters on collision course with African cultures. The drollest of these was Mathieu Kassovitz's Metisse (Blended). A brown-skinned beauty (Julie Mauduech) has two lovers, one an African aristocrat (Hubert Kounde), the other a scruffy working-class Jew (Kassovitz). She is also pregnant. Her lovers won't know who the father is until the baby is born -- which means nine months of bickering, and 90 movie minutes of canny, slapdash dancing along the razor edge of racial animosity.