Film Festival 09 - Modern Life
Modern Life
La Vie moderne, France 2008, 88m
Director: Raymond Depardon
Festivals: Cannes (Un Certain Regard), Vancouver, London 2008; San
Francisco 2009
Filmmaker/Magnum photographer Raymond Depardon's connection with
the isolated farming communities of France's Haute-Loire region
goes back to his childhood there. You sense the familiarity as his
camera steers you surely down twisting mountain roads to pull up at
another ancient stone farmhouse. His interviews with a handful of
the region's old small-landholders are composed with an arresting
formality that conveys simple respect. Every encounter reverberates
with generations of experience and obstinate allegiance to the
land. A film for the ages. - BG.
"Depardon has met some of these farmers and households before. But
they were never filmed with this intensity of attention and
affection, this Rembrandt-like luminosity of portraiture. The film
is a valediction forbidding mourning& These people would rather
die than reveal a thought or feeling. Which makes all the greater
the film's feat in conveying this world - its prejudices, its
passions (for the old turnings of earth and time), its bereavement
pangs, its jealous solitariness. These men look like great
paintings as they sit there, saying nothing with their mouths, yet
saying everything with the glitter of their eyes, the set of their
jaws& Near the end, the grimmest farmer of all, sitting or
half-reclining in a field, lets slip& a single, rolling,
unrecalled tear. 'C'est la fin' he mutters. He feels no need to
explain what is at an end. We know& The world has to grow up;
the greater number has to gain the greater good. But that is no
reason not to record and immortalise the individual tragedies that
feed the mulch and march of history." - Harlan Kennedy,
americancinemapapers.com
In France and Occitan, with English subtitles
