International Film Festival : Modern Life (Review)

Director: Raymond Depardon
Country: France
Year: 2008
Running time: 88 mins
Genre: Documentary
Producer: Claudine Nougaret
Language: French and Occitan
Subtitles: English
With: Marcel Privat, Raymond Privat, Alain Rouvière, Cécile Rouvière, Marcelle Bresse, Paul Argaud, Amandine Valla, Michel Valla, Marcel Challaye, Germaine Challaye

Festivals: Cannes (Un certain regard), Vancouver, London 2008, San Francisco 2009
Winner Prix Louis-Delluc 2008

Session Times:
Thu 30 July : 10.45 am : Embassy Theatre
Sun 2 August: 11.00 am : Embassy Theatre

Synopsis:

The narrator returns to the French region of Cevennes where he meets with the farmers he knew in his youth. The small landholders he interviews see their way of life change as they struggle to compete with modern industrial farming. Young farmers struggle to believe in their profession, and gain the acceptance of the older generation.

We follow an endearing elderly couple whose dairy herd has shrunk from 40 cows to only two, as they try to stay afloat. Another story shows a city woman and the problems she has being accepted by her new husband’s family.

Review:

Modern Life (‘La Vie Moderne’), a moving documentary set in the French countryside, is the third chapter in the ‘Portraits series’ of French photographer/ director Raymond Depardon.

The camera reveals the lives of cattle breeders, their feelings, fears, and above all, their quiet measured way of living

We get a peek into their universe, which is sometimes sad and often hard, in a way that is not voyeuristic, but treated with sensitivity and honesty.

Raymond Depardon is ‘an eye who listens’ as the French poet Paul Claudel would say. He captures the light before the beauty in the manner of the realist painter Jean-Francois Millet. The director’s gaze is close, and so is the camera, but the characters trust him, and they are natural before it: Raymond Depardon comes from the same countryside and he knows these highlanders well.

This documentary highlights problems of the generation gap, the position of women on the farm, unfertile land, tiny pensions, and the uncertain future of small farms in France. Germaine, Marcel, Gilberte and the other breeders struggle with their natural reticence and modesty inherent in French country people. But if you are attentive, you could perceive their soul.

‘Modern Life’ is the best way to see what is happening in the farming sector and the tragedy which is changing the face of some parts of rural France.

ENDS

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