CINEMA: From Major to Miner

The Quality Merchandise label is stamped all over Germinal. Gerard Depardieu, who heads the film's huge cast, is the one French actor with worldwide heft and clout. Director Claude Berri is among France's toniest auteurs and producers. Now he and Gerard Brach have adapted Emile Zola's sprawling indictment of a novel. The result is dispiriting: a minor work on a huge canvas.

For 160 claustrophobic minutes, Berri locks viewers inside Zola's 19th century coal mines, where death by cave-in seems only slightly worse than the 12-hour-a-day life sentences that are the miners' jobs. Aboveground too, everything seems a dark metaphor for exploitation. Sex, marriage, even motherhood are tainted by capitalist precepts: a woman's basic job is to keep the workers sated and breed more of them.

In this determinist bleakness, where is the lamplight of hope? In a union of the workers against the bosses? Dream on. The miners endure such harsh lives that when they start a strike, they must brutalize the workers who oppose it. The workers have lost the victim's halo; now their hands will be soiled by blood as well as coal dust.

Excepting a few scenes of adulterous frivol among the ruling class, the film is remarkably fair-minded in doling out bad hands to workers and bosses. But because the theme is that the Industrial Revolution ground human beings into human beasts, Berri can't explore the very individual perfidy that was at the heart of Jean de Florette. Germinal, with its climactic mine disaster and bitter lamentations, is finally buried in its fidelity to its source.