Le Brasier (1991) - film review

1931, in a mining town in Trieux, Northern France, mutual distrust and resentment divides the native French population and the growing community of Polish immigrants who work along side each other in the mines.   A prominent Polish man Pavlak earns extra money as a boxer to support his family, all of whom work in the mine.  His eldest son, Victor, falls in love with a young French woman, Alice, but they are kept apart by their families and Alice is forced to marry a Frenchman, Emile.  Events come to ahead when some Polish miners are unfairly dismissed.  The Polish miners decide that a strike is the only way to win better treatment for themselves...

This first full-length film by Eric Barbier is certainly an ambitious effort but it is weighed down by the enormity of its scope.  The film has strong similarities with Claude Berri’s equally ambitious 1993 film Germinal, which is also centred around a mining community and touches on similar themes.   In both films the underlying human drama is lost beneath an extravagant attempt to recreate an accurate representation of life at the time in which the film is set.  The unremitting pessimism of the background renders individual personal dramas virtually meaningless, and the social context of the film is too abstract, too distant to trigger any genuine emotional response in its audience.

On the plus side, this film is visually quite impressive, with a stunning recreation of a mining town which ought to provide an atmospheric backdrop for the drama.   However, the talent which is so much in evidence on the visual side merely serves to emphasise the deficiencies elsewhere, particularly in the acting and the script.  The film has some great moments of tragic poignancy but these singularly fail to hit their mark, through a combination of poor dialogue, laboured direction and stilted acting performances.

The film’s main fault, however, is its lack of focus.  It starts out as a conventional love triangle and ends up making a social comment about racism and workers’ rights.  If the film had concentrated on one or other of these themes, it would have had much greater impact.  Instead, by trying to cover too much ground, with an over-emphasis on the cinematography (a fault of many French film directors in the late 1980s), the result is overall somewhat disappointing.

© James Travers 2001

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