Looks like a tough sell. Two and three-quarters hours, give or take, on the dismal lot of coal miners in the north of France in the late 19th Century. And it's no use trying to convince the moviegoer that Claude Berri, who turned to the works of Pagnol for Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, and who turns now to those of Zola, is the French James Ivory. The culture vulture's respect for literature cannot be expected to include a willingness to read subtitles: he might as well read the book! Then, too, no one in an E.M. Forster novel ever castrated a fresh cadaver and then brandished the dismembered member in triumph. And the social-crusader approach of Zola -- as a style, that is, quite separate from the subject matter of the crusade -- dates even faster than the amused-onlooker approach of Forster. The soap-box orator, even more than the drawing-room wit, needs to be addressing himself to current events in order to hold an audience. A period piece is no place for the artistic hammerhead. If the screen treatment of the novel loses a lot in urgency, however, it retains substantial value as an historical document, crammed with details of the miners' daily life: what they eat, what they do for recreation, how they bathe, how they lower a horse into the mines, how they themselves are lowered into them (an elevator shaft as visually spectacular as the interior of any science-fictional space station). The handsome wide-screen photography and fastidious set design maximize the flow of information. With Renaud, Miou-Miou, Gerard Depardieu, Jean-Roger Milo, Jean Carmet, Anny Duperey. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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