Synopsis |Appreciation |Afterthoughts
1993 Color 136 mins
Produced by Cinémathèque de Reims
Written and Directed by Claude Berry (based on the novel of the same name by Zola) Cinematography by Patrick Bourdieu Main Cast: Miu Miu (as Maire's Wife) Jean-Renault (as Lantier) Jean-Calmé (as Souvarine) Yudit Henri (as Gatlina) Jean-Rorie Miro (as Gatlina) Jean-Robert Milo (as Gatlina) Calmey (as Souvarine) Yudit Henri (as Gatrina) Jean-Laure Miro (as Maire's father) Gérard Depardieu (as Maire)
Synopsis
In 1863, Lantière, dismissed from his job at the railroad company in the city of Lille because of his radical ideas, comes to the mines of the Carré department in search of a job.
The first person he met was an old man who coughed incessantly, a miner who had been working in the coal mines for 40 years and had been nicknamed "the immortal" because he had survived three catastrophes, and whose lungs were filled with dust and spit black sputum, and who was the father of Maire. He was Maheu's father. He guided Lantier to the entrance of the pit. The cable car keeps sending thousands of miners down to the bottom of the pit in cages.
Before dawn, Maher's daughter, Gatlina, wakes the family to go to work. Maher's wife, who has given birth to seven children, complains again that the family has run out of money to buy bread.
The dark-coated miners were digging coal at the face with hand picks, and then using their hands to load the lumps into carts, which were pulled out of the incline by men or horses. The engineer finds the roadway support unsafe and threatens Maher with a fine, who is too angry to speak.
After work, the Mauer family scrambles to take turns bathing in a large barrel full of hot water, the eldest son rushes out after the bath to go out on a date with the woman who manages the lamps, and Mauer is just out of the tub and wants to make out with his wife.
Lantier takes the place of one of the dead women workers and settles into a small store. He sits at an open-air café watching Gatrina being pulled into the grove by a man, and is quite upset. The marketplace is bustling with activity, with Mahé watching a cockfight, and he treats Lantier to a local grilled sausage and joins in the dancing in the square.
Lantier befriends Souvarine, a no ****ist, in a small store. He believes that in order to improve the living conditions of the workers, it is necessary to unite and set up a mutual aid society to reason with the employers. Suvarin believes that the only way out is to smash the world with violence. The two debates are red in the face, although their views are different, but after all, they are on the same side.
The workers gathered in the square are indignant because of the lowering of wages by the employer, and at the instigation of Rantier, the workers start a strike. The general manager of the mine, Gregoire, after a hearty lunch, standing next to the crackling fireplace in his luxurious home, arrogantly receives the representatives of the striking workers. Negotiations between the two sides were fruitless. The workers went to the river to fish, and only a very few still went to work, including Gatrina and her husband. The strikers called them traitors and stopped them at the pit to fight. The women went to the bakery and looted the food and trashed the store. The owner of the bakery, who often hooks up with women, is driven to the roof of the house, where he panics and loses his footing and falls to his death.
The strike continues for more than a month, with the employer calling in workers from Belgium, and the strikers try to stop the group of strike-breaking foreigners, but the military and police arrive one after the other. Maher led the workers in a confrontation with the uniformed police, who opened fire when the workers began throwing stones. Maheu and dozens of workers were killed instantly. Maher's wife cried as she hugged the body.
The strike failed and the workers had to go to work still. Lantier also went down the well with a lot of anger. Suvaram smashed the drainage equipment in the middle of the night, and groundwater poured into the well. The workers in the well realized the gushing water and quickly fled to the cage, but the elevator only got some of the workers out, and the cage's cable was snapped. The underground workers had to run to the emergency exit, but the safety tunnel collapsed, trapping many of the workers underground. Lantier assisted Gatlina to look for a way out, but hit a wall and had to lie down in a waterless area and wait for help. Gatlina's husband has long held a grudge against Lantier for loving his wife, and at this time was also trapped at the bottom of the well. When he saw Lantier lying with his wife, his jealousy flared up. He tries to *** Exhausted Gatrina, and is stoned to death by Lantier. Gatlina falls happily into Lantier's arms.
The rescuers finally hear Lantier banging on the shed posts, but by the time they get him out, the beautiful Gatrina has stopped breathing.
After the mine was flooded, there was a gas explosion, and both of Maheu's sons died, leaving Maheu's wife devastated. Out of compassion, the mine manager's wife took his daughter to visit the Maheu family, Maheu's father "can't die" because of the disaster after disaster, the nerves are almost out of order, he strangled the general manager's daughter, Cecile, with both hands.
The strike, which has brought suffering to every family, has led to the hatred of its organizer, Lantier, who has been spat at and beaten by the collar of his coat. He knew that it would take more than a day to enlighten the workers. He decided to go elsewhere first to mobilize the masses.
Before leaving, he came to the pit to say goodbye to the workers. Maheu's wife had to work in the pit by herself because there were no more male laborers in the family. Suvarin had fled the mine after destroying it, and Maher's father, who had not been convicted of insanity, languished in his home.
Ranthier, embarking on a new journey, knows that the strike has failed for the time being, but the seeds of revenge have been planted, and on the ground saturated with the blood of the workers, a new struggle will soon sprout, which, once it breaks through the ground, will have unlimited vitality.
Testimonials
émile Zola was one of the most important French writers of critical realism in the second half of the 19th century, and a leading proponent of French naturalist literature. His Italian father died when he was seven years old, leaving his widow and orphan to live in poverty, which had a great influence on Zola's later depiction of the life of the lower strata of society. 1885 published The Germ, a masterpiece of Zola's realism to reach the highest achievement. It successfully portrayed the image of industrial proletarians for the first time in the history of French and even world literature. It not only depicted the poverty and suffering of the miners, but also pointed out that such inhuman living conditions were the evils of the capitalist system. The Sprout, a somber epic of the workers' movement, is a passionate salute.
To commemorate the centenary of the publication of The Sprout, the famous French director Claude Berri once again brought it to the screen. Back in 1913, French director Abel Capellani made The Sprout into a 140-minute black-and-white silent film. Despite the fact that the movie was like a play with only eight scenes, its social impact made a huge impact. It should be noted that the film ends with a labor-management handshake, which not only betrays the spirit of the original work, but also reduces its social significance.In 1962, French director Yves Alegré again made a 110-minute black-and-white film, which has a clear narrative and elaborate images, but is not sufficiently socially impactful. Although the main chapters of the novel are faithfully reproduced, the main contradiction of capitalist society vividly depicted by Zola, i.e. the struggle between labor and capital, is not yet prominent in the film. The author deliberately depicted "the rise of wage labor" and "the struggle between capital and labor" did not become the main line of the film.
Claude Berri's new film, The Sprout, is very different from the two previous films of the same name. It is a tragic epic of the workers' movement, and we hear the voice of the working class crying out for justice. We see the miners, who have been brutally exploited for more than a hundred years, from their grandfathers to their fathers, roaring for bread, their anger erupting like a volcano, destroying everything, sweeping everything away, the wild current growing in strength and rolling forward. In the scene of the struggle against the heavily armed military police, we see thousands of miners, roaring forward, those in front falling down, those behind coming up. The anger and hatred accumulated over generations erupted in the workers who were primed for enlightenment. Like the waves of the sea, they swept in and locked up the entire mine. The strikers were fearless in the face of the bayonets of the military police. After the strike, they were cut off from their economic resources, and the mutual aid societies advocated by Lantier came into play. The organization and steadfastness of the industrial workers are fully reflected in this film. The theme of the proletariat coming to the forefront of history as an integral force appears for the first time in literature, and Berry's film sharply highlights the social significance of the original work.
The film is structured very closely to the original, like an imposing symphony, and can be divided into seven parts. The first four parts are the introduction, the opening, the development, the depth, the vein is clear about the miners' resistance to the mood of generation, expansion and soaring, the introduction is full of revolutionary ideas Rantier came to the mines only to his propaganda and agitation work as the main line through all the film. The director uses contrasting techniques to reveal the antagonism between labor and capital: workers have no bread to eat, but the assets eat a lot of delicacies, the manager's daughter, Cecile, is still lethargic at 3:00 a.m., while Gatrina gets up in the middle of the night and has to go to work. Deep contradictions and crises lie in wait, and sooner or later they must break out. Part 5 is the *** - strike of the movie, the last two parts depict the failure of the strike and the epilogue. The movie from the main character Lantiye in the pre-dawn darkness, from the field path to the mine began, to his last with hope to leave the mine, before the dawn is coming, embarked on a new journey to the end of the whole film before and after echoing as one.
"Sprout", a symbol of hope and promise, appears and disappears throughout the movie. After Lantier propagates the revolutionary struggle among the miners, sowing seeds on the fertile black earth, the symbol appears with the arrival of spring, as the protagonist looks out at the vibrant waves of wheat and the voice-over says: "While people are lamenting their suffering underground, a piece of life is sprouting and advancing above ground." In a late-night chat, with Lantier's deep gaze out the window at the star-studded night sky, the audience again hears his heartfelt words, "Now that the miners are thoroughly enlightened, they are beginning to sprout like a good seed buried in the ground." After the strike begins, there is a dead silence on the surface, the cable cars no longer roll, and people are wordlessly fishing by the river, but the audience feels that there is no sound at this time, and even the father of the unconscious Maheu realizes that "deep in the mines an army is growing, and that this generation of new people is like a seed that is sprouting, and that will soon break through the ground and thrive under the warmth of the sun! ". At the end of the movie, with the main character's brisk steps into the distance, the voice-over says: "Day by day, the ranks are growing, the black army of vengeance is slowly growing in the fields, and they are going to make the coming years a fruitful harvest. The germ of this army is about to break through the earth and become active over the world." Almost all of Zola's works end in tragedy, the mood is quite low; director Berry dealt with the "Sprout" a piece of although also end in tragedy, but the mood is optimistic and light-hearted. This kind of optimistic mood with foreshadowing gives the strike struggle with high fighting breath, so that the movie has an epic and tragic momentum, the picture is majestic and rich in romantic lyrical meaning. It can be seen that the director of this film y understands Zola's mentality of having full confidence in the social vision, reflecting that the original work has y analyzed the social reality, summarized, refined and sublimated the common daily life, and grasped the result of the essence of things. Therefore, it can be said that the movie got rid of Zola's naturalistic depiction method of crawling on top of reality, and brought the work back to the principle of critical realism.
However, writer-director Claude Berri, in order to be faithful to the original work, still followed the naturalistic writing style of the original in depicting the private life of Maier and his wife, in depicting Gatrina's rendezvous with her lover, and in exposing the bakery owner's exploitation of the women's poverty to take advantage of them. Such depictions of real-life often reflect neither the ideological characteristics of the characters nor much social content, and actually reflect, to some extent, Zola's erroneous view of the object of depiction. Zola believed that the miners' ignorance, rudeness and uncivilization made them necessarily indulgent and like to do dirty action. This view of Zola made his image of the workers perhaps closer to the truth, but it actually detracted a lot from it. In addition, Zola still has illusions about the bourgeoisie, and this is much reflected in the movie. He believed that the bosses were profit-seeking, but not lacking in humanity, and even had good feelings, so he depicted the chaotic actions of smashing stores and vandalizing in the strike in a reproachful manner: the strangling of the manager's daughter, the kind-hearted Cécile, by the unknowing father of Maheu, is an example of this. There are many references to Zola's reformist ideas.
The film is in color, but the lighting and tones are almost black. The coal-mining region is characterized by a blackness. The outside of the mines is black with coal and ash, the inside of the mines is even blacker, the miners are covered in black "coal blacks", the phlegm they spit out and the blood they bleed when they are killed are black. Only when it snows does the village turn white, but it is "like being wrapped in a corpse cloth". If white is a sign of death and nothingness, black is a symbol of melancholy, fear and oppression. The blackness of the world is the reality in which the miners live. This symbolic landscape is depicted as grim and bleak as a print, giving the film a great deal of poignancy. The highlights of the movie are often centered on Miu Miu's role as the wife of Ma Er. Originally a coal-cart pusher, she works day and night at home to support her family of 10. After giving birth to seven children, she is no longer interested in ***, and when her husband attempts to have sex after his bath, she cries out her daughter's name in fear of conceiving another child. Before the strike she took her children to beg at the manager's house, and when the strike began she was left with nothing at home, but she still encouraged the miners to persevere. After her husband's death, she had to take over his job and go down to the mines, doing 10 hours of hard work and earning 30 sous to support her family. What she went through gradually made her realize that the day of revenge would always come, and this kind-hearted woman finally broke out in a cry of rage when life forced her to do so. In Lantiye is about to embark on a new journey, came to the mine to say goodbye to her, she said to him: "We suffered two months of hunger, sold all the family belongings, the children are sick, is it just in vain? Are we still going to be asked to live that unreasonable life?" Miao Miao successfully portrayed the image of this ordinary and great working women.
International film star Gérard Depardieu in this film, portrayed a respected integrity of the miners, he was inspired by Lantier to participate in the Workers' Mutual Aid Association, led the workers to petition during the strike, and straight to the military police without fear, and finally drank a bullet and died. At the beginning of the film, before the cast list is played, he solemnly declares: "In response to the growing unemployment in France, I am advocating the establishment of a "Sprout Federation", which aims to solve the problem of the difficulties of life of the actors and actresses, and I warmly welcome the participation of people from all walks of life. This organization will begin its activities in 1995. I call on all parts of the country to set up such federations. For this is not a charity, but an organization of solidarity." Has not this great work of literature, born more than a century ago, had a profound and long-lasting historical impact and demonstrated its monumental vitality?