La Vie moderne (2008) - film review

Journalist Raymond Depardon revisits the small rural farms in France that he knew as a child and interviews a number of provincial farmers who are struggling to make a living on the land.  It is a hard life they follow and many are well beyond the age at which most people retire nowadays.  With no one to take over the running of their farms, they have no choice but to continue working into their eighties, seemingly oblivious to the changes that have taken place in the outside world.  It is a way of life that is on the point of disappearing forever...

La Vie moderne isn’t so much a documentary as an essential sociological document which records for posterity a way of life and a class of humanity that are fast becoming a thing of the past.  The third part of Raymond Depardon’s remarkable trilogy of rural life - following Profils paysans: le quotidien (2005) and Profils paysans: l’approche (2001) - its main focus is the continuity of the old peasant farmer life, the passing of the baton from one generation to the next.  The film’s title may appear ironic but it is a statement of fact, since the way of life which the men and women depicted in the film have adhered to for seven decades or more is very much in tune with modern ecological concerns, and, in a real sense, they represent the future of our race, human beings working with nature to build a sustainable life for themselves whilst preserving the environment.  It is we who are the anomaly, destined for extinction, not they.

Yet, despite this positive overarching assertion, the film also has a tragic personal dimension.  Most of the people we meet in the film are in their eighties, struggling to keep their farms going with no prospect of handing over their businesses or their knowledge to the next generation.  There are a few glimmers of hope - a little boy is eager to become a farmer when he grows up; some young people are working hard to make a living on the land, despite the difficulties.  But the tone of the film is overridingly melancholic.  Marcel (80) and Germaine (70) are facing the reality that they must soon sell their farm as their children have no interest in the life.  Raymond (83) watches helplessly as one of his beloved cows dies from an incurable disease, whilst his brother Marcel (88) no longer has the strength to take his flock of sheep up into the hills.  As you take in these personal crises, you can’t help feeling that something is wrong, that this generation of extraordinarily resilient and hardworking people has been betrayed - not so much by their children, but by the materialistic era in which they find themselves, an era that does not sufficiently respect or value what they are doing to preserve the ecosystem, the rural traditions and our precious countryside.

As he reveals in his narration, Raymond Depardon grew up on a farm, although he left the milieu when he was sixteen to pursue a very successful career as a photo-journalist and documentary filmmaker.  Depardon’s nostalgia for a way of life that has now virtually passed away is evident both in the way he films the isolated farms and their time-wracked owners and also in the way he extols the virtues of the old-fashioned agricultural life, which is less a career and more a vocation, far more concerned with preserving the land and respecting nature than in extracting the greatest profit.  Depardon’s commentary is as moving and insightful as the hesitant responses his shy interviewees give to his questions, and it is hard not to share his sorrow for a world and a culture that are rapidly fading away, unseen and unlamented by most people.  La Vie moderne is an eye-opening and deeply moving film, one that leaves you with an aching sense that paradise is well and truly lost.

© James Travers 2012

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