Touted as the most expensive French film to date, Germinal is a sprawling, ambitious dramatisation of Emil Zola's 1885 classic novel chronicling a punishing coalminer's strike in the bleak hinterlands of northern France in the 1860s. Adapted by Ariette Langmann and director Claude Berri, the film fairly resonates with the requisite anger and measured passion befitting a polemically-focused, agitprop-leaning, historical epic but at its centre it remains emotionally stunted, invariably eliciting indifference and demurral in equal measure. Boasting the same visual flair and iconographic veracity of Berri's Jean De Florette and Manon des Sources, but devoid of those films' emotional pull, it's a respectable but lumbering saga, earnest in its political acuity and impressive in the verisimilitude of its period design and broad brush sweep. As the idealistic strike leader Etienne Lantier, the imposing Gerard Depardieu straddles the screen with a committed, blustering performance but it's not enough to quicken the film's pulse. Co-stars Miou Miou, Renard and Jean Carnet gamely prop up the ongoing histrionics but it's still a long haul.
