Product Details

• Actors: Renaud, Gérard Depardieu, Miou-Miou, Jean Carmet, Judith Henry
• Directors: Claude Berri
• Writers: Claude Berri, Arlette Langmann, Émile Zola
• Producers: Claude Berri, Bodo Scriba, Pierre Grunstein
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 2
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• VHS Release Date: February 13, 1996
• Run Time: 160 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303269370
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #77,660 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Emile Zola's novel of a rural mine town and a perilous worker's strike becomes a big-budget film of grit and torment in Germinal. The first half of the movie captures a world just this side of prison where whole families work in the Voreux mines with a daily dose of coal dust covering their skins and clogging their minds. Escapes are rare: a drink at the company bar or a carnival. An outsider provokes talk of a strike, something the failing owners want as well. When the workers revolt, it becomes a monster. While true to Zola's passion for the worker and social change, the movie cannot recover from the operatic drama that turns the action into mere motion, failing to draw in the audience (although this is an impressive-looking film, with Voreux passing as the real thing). Viewers will be moved by the workers' plight, the daily grime that they must rinse away, and their efforts to instill a normal life in this industrial hell--and will surely learn to appreciate their own jobs, whatever the inadequacies. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker

Claude Berri's latest epic, adapted from Zola, is set in nineteenth-century France, a lot of it underground. There, such miners as Maheu (Gérard Depardieu), the creepy Chaval (Jean-Roger Milo), and the troubled newcomer, Etienne (Renaud), ply their spine-cracking trade and work up steam against the venal demands of the company. Things are no easier at ground level; Maheu and his wife (a downcast Miou-Miou) already have countless children to feed, and we get to see them making a new one, up against the kitchen sink. Depardieu is all lusty brawn and strident yearnings, but Maheu is too dull and decent a role for the actor's loutish sense of fun. The movie itself is a largely fun-free zone. No one could argue with its cry for justice, but individual stories tend to get drowned out, and the act of watching it comes embarrassingly close to life in the pits-a long, hard slog in the dark. Berri has opted for the unhurried narrative sprawl that served him so well in "Jean de Florette," but this time the private battles at its core seem far less gripping. Just occasionally, everything clicks: when a stolid, silent old miner strangles the life out of a rich young girl, you feel the rage of a whole society sharpened to a terrible point. In French. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SIX STARS, April 1, 2006

By 

C. L Wilson (Elmhurst, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Germinal [Region 2] (DVD)

This is one of the great ones. Every bit as riveting as "Shindler's List", it is not about the Jews and The Holocaust, but a less immediate cause - coal miners in France in 1884. Deserves to be one of France's top ten films of all time. Costing $30 million, it's worth every penny. At two hours, 38 minutes, it never lost me for a second. I sat enthralled, immersed in the poverty, meanness, and ugliness of the world Berri's camera shows us. The extras he used are actual descendants of the original striking coal miners Emile Zola based his novel on. The title means germination, as in the workers planted a seed of unions and justice which would in fact sprout in the 20th century. Gerard Depardieu was really part of a large ensemble cast, each with great parts. It was especially good in showing us that there are no easy winners, or answers, in the contrast of rich and poor. The poor would be just like the rich if they had the chance, and enough to eat does not necessarily bring happiness. There was romance here, and violence, sharp and quick, darkness and light, sumptious dinner scenes, and dirty people in dank mines. This should not be buried in obscurity. A great story, passionately told

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Très bien fait!, February 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Germinal [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Avec les personnages croyables, la vraie dépiction de la vie pauvre, et tout ça, Germinal est un film pour toutes sortes de personnes. Gérard Dépardieu et Miou-Miou sont, comme toujours, très bons acteurs, et le réalisateur a très bien fait avec tout. C'est un film à voir!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Definitely worth looking at, thanks to Berris directing, June 4, 2000

By 

Owen Hughes (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Germinal [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Although this is a long slow film, it is nevertheless worth a look for its competent portrayal of life in a mining community in northern France in the 1800s (and which has definite parallels with similar lives then being lived in other communities, on both sides of the Atlantic). Claude Berri is a superb director and it is to him we owe the continuity in what could otherwise have been a ponderous film, lost in its own blackness and despair. Certainly there is plenty of coal dust about and the grime is intended to remind us not only of the harshness of the lives being led only a bare 100 years ago, but also of our own ability to work today, without raising much of a sweat. Gérard Depardieu lends incredible strength to any film and this one benefits greatly by his presence; so much so in fact, that at the moment he leaves the scene, the film immediately falters.

If there was a technical fault with this production, then for me it was the move it made from the general to the particular. While setting out to be a social document about the fight of the workers for better living conditions (and hence an emulation of Émile Zola's novel), in the latter stages it became too concerned with an actual event: the imprisonment of miners after a tunnel collapse. This didn't work for me at all, since it made the film fragmentary and incoherent. Yet overall, the film achieves its purpose and the personal drama that I didn't particularly care for may well appeal to other viewers. Claude Berri has created a number of other very fine films, including the unforgettable "Jean de Florette" and "Manon des sources," and hopefully "Germinal" will encourage you to seek them out.