Word: berry
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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directed by Claude Berri...
...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...
...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...
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...
...course, the same bliss that director Claude Berri offered us in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, his adaptations of Marcel Pagnol's fictions. And indeed, Uranus (it takes its title from the dark, cold planet) resembles those limpid works in its setting, tone and sympathetic anatomy of a provincial society...