In mid-nineteenth-century northern France, a coal mining town's workers are exploited by the mine's owner. One day, they decide to go on strike, and the authorities repress them.First, my confession: I have not read "Germinal". I've thought about it, but among all the great works of literature, it never quite made it to the top of the list. That being said, from what I hear, this film follows the story rather close.What strikes me is how much "smut" the film has. At least in the first half. I find it hard to imagine such things being in the novel, but rural men forcing themselves on rural women in France seems oddly normal. I guess my opinion of France is pretty strange.

Berri once again turns a book into a near masterpiece, as he did with "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of the Spring". This adaptation of Emile Zola's dark polemic novel abut the hard lives of French miners in 19th century France is both political and epic, with neither element drowning out the other. Very strong performances abound. Miou-Miou is heartbreaking and, at times, frightening in her rage, as a mother and wife trying to help her family survive on the slave like wages paid buy the mine -- her anger growing ever harder to control as the mine literally consumers her family. Gerard Depardieu is also excellent as her husband, a big, likable fellow who is finally pushed too far by the bosses and working conditions. He joins with a more educated newcomer to the area, played by the also excellent Renaud, to help start a strike against their bosses, who plead poverty, and the inability to pay the workers more (indeed they want to cut wages), but who live in "Let them eat cake" splendor. While the film may be heavy handed at times in its cross cutting between the lives of rich and the poor, it escapes the trap of making "the poor" just a lovable, or pitiable mob .These are well drawn individuals, with light and dark sides, (some with more of one than the other) and the violence of the mob is shown as ugly and brutal, if also understandable. Berri is not above acknowledging that it sometimes takes violence to force change, but even if that change may be for the good on the large scale, the violence also always leads to tragedy in the realm of individual human beings. The film is beautifully shot and art directed, the grim hard life in the mines brought to startlingly real life, full of details and specifics that help, once again, the film transcend generalizations about being poor. These men and women take pride in their difficult, dirty and dangerous work, even as they have reached the end of their tether with their poverty.

Making a two-hour film out of a 500 page book is tough, sure. But this version stinks. I'm sure someone really thought (Claude Berri?) this would be good. The problem is the film scratches the surface of the world Zola created. An obvious example is the mine, Le Voreux itself, in the beginning is described as a kind of living, breathing, horrific thing that swallows humans by the cartload. The trepidation of Etienne in going down to work is described in the book with such detail that when you watch the film the reality of what horror it must have really been is reduced to a simple look of anxiety on Etienne's face while he comfortably waits to descend. There is no trace of the idea of Le Voreux being a monstrous man-swallower. Missing this thematic point has nothing to do with a film's running length. It's a classic movie rendering of a book, without flavor, without guts, without imagination. The casting is atrocious. Etienne is supposed to be twenty-one years old, this guy looks well into his thirties (he was 40 in 1992). It's an important factor. Gerard Depardieu is fat as Maheu, in the book these poor people were starving to death, skinny to the point of emaciation, yet here is Depardieu looking very well fed. Who said Depardieu was physically perfect for the role? Are you nuts? These people were starving to death. The way they portrayed the poor was so prettied up, the younger sister was hunchbacked by malnutrition in the book but here is a cute healthy looking girl of course, their hair is clean and clothes relatively tidy, they look like modern people dressed up. If they wanted to make it look real, these people would have looked like they were suffering physically, as Zola described them. Malnourished, with bad skin, teeth, etc. Berri or whomever didn't have the guts to really show what they must have looked like, it would have been too extreme. Yet the extremity is the book's central character in a way. Without that, this is garbage. Another example, in the mines, in the book, the characters would have to crawl on their hands and knees to get to the seam in places, in pitch-black darkness at points, and Etienne would have suffered all sorts of bruises and cuts, but in the movie they just stroll on up to the spot. The characters and setting in the movie do no justice to how the book describes things like the temperature, freezing cold one minute and dying of heat the next. There are many examples like this. I had to turn it off. The acting wasn't that good either, not necessarily their fault, when they're forced to generalize things that were compressed and not naturally developed in the film the way they were in the book. Look, of course it's difficult to adapt a book, especially a good book, but if you can't do it, just don't. You're embarrassing yourself. The contrast between the classes in this book and how it completely illuminates their difference make the story make sense. This movie unfortunately doesn't come close. Only stupid 21st/20th Century minds from the Civilized West could actually think the poor characters in the movie were shown realistically as impoverished. We have no idea. That's why you read the book. Make the movie if you have the courage to do it justice. Without showing the real conditions, the desperation of the people to strike doesn't make sense, they have to be willing to die, because they're dying already.

I've never been interested in costume drama's that deal with 18th and 19th century high society. As I once said before in another review: "There is just too much gold foil, too much ugly wigs and pompous costumes, too much over the top decors, just too much of everything that I detest in it" and I really haven't changed my idea about that so far. But when I'm able to see a movie that deals with the life of the ordinary man in that time period, than I'm always willing to give it a chance."Germinal" is such a movie that deals with life of the ordinary man and woman. It tells the story of the coal miners in the region of Lille, in the North of France at the end of the 19th century. They are all poor, they work too hard in awful conditions and they don't get paid what they deserve by the bosses who only want to get richer and richer by doing whatever they can so they won't have to pay a cent to their workforce. Of course the miners aren't happy with that situation and when they get into contact with two men who both want to change the situation, one a communist union man and the other one an anarchist, the miners soon go on a strike, with some very unpleasant consequences as a result...What first went through my mind while seeing this one, was that this movie has a lot of similarities with "Daens" (1993), the Belgian movie that tells the story of the poor textile workers in Flanders at the end of the 19th century. It's the same time period and both regions are only about 60 miles or 90 kilometers apart. If you like to see what life in the European industrial regions at the end of the 19th century was like, than both movies are certainly something you shouldn't miss.What I liked about the movie as well was that it had a good pace and that it stayed interesting from the beginning until the end. It could have been very easy for the director to make a movie about this subject that lasted 5 or 6 hours, but than it might have lost much of its power. Now, you get a pretty good idea of what life in that region during the industrial revolution was like, without having to struggle through too many details that don't really contribute to the story. Next to the good story, I must say that I also liked the acting. Even though Gérard Depardieu hasn't always made the best choices of movies to play in, I always like him in the role of the ordinary man, the underdog that has to fight the system. I liked him in the mini-series "Les Misérables" as well and he has the same kind of role in this movie. The other actors did a fine job as well, even though I have to admit that I don't really know anyone of them, except for Bernard Fresson perhaps. All in all this is a very good adaptation of the novel by Émile Zola. It does exactly what I expected from it and that's why I give it at least a 7.5/10.