Dir. Raymond Depardon, France, 2008, 86 mins, French with subtitles, documentary
Cast (as themselves): Raymond Depardon, Paul Argaud, Germaine Challaye, Marcel Challaye
Review by Mike Bartlett
A documentary on French farmers might not be everybody's idea of a great night out, but Raymond Depardon has a knack of turning this material into something beautiful and universally affecting. For the past decade, he has been visiting the remote Cévennes region of central France and crafting periodic portraits of the inhabitants and their way of life. The third in this Profile Paysans series, Modern Life also looks set to be the last, as the farmers have now reached the brink of collapse and their offspring have rejected their parents' traditions for a more cosmopolitan lifestyle.
For this reason alone, the film is a valuable artefact - a portrait of a vanishing community, like many in the west, brutally ignored by a contemptuous and uncomprehending urban majority. Depardon, though, is not interested in the political realities faced by the farmers; he seldom asks them direct questions about economic pressures or government policy, something for which he has been criticised. But I value his more subtle approach where he simply engages his subjects in light conversation, allowing them to dictate the course of discussion and therefore hold forth on their own terms. These are taciturn people and the results will win no prizes for witty banter. But what emerges is a truer portrait of their nature, where one casual aside can reveal volumes. It allows the viewer to get to know them as individuals rather than as representatives of a social group.
One particular interview sticks in the mind. The youngest son of a long-standing peasant family has been cornered into taking over the estate after his siblings have flown the coop. We first see him posed with his parents and their dog, and here Depardon's judicious use of framing comes into effect. The son is noticeably pushed to one side while the patriarch takes centre stage and stares defiantly into the lens. Later, Depardon approaches the son as he works the fields on his tractor. Throughout the ensuing dialogue, which seems to last forever, the man seems to say hardly a word, but communicates everything – his solitude, his frustration at being left behind, his inability to escape the farm, his desperate attempts to score work elsewhere. It's all in the movement – fiddling awkwardly with the tractor controls, staring off into the middle distance, refusing to look the interviewer in the eye. The result is the single most haunting sequence in the last year of film.
Cynically dismissed as “left-wing conservatism” by Sight and Sound, Modern Life, along with Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours (2008), actually represents a new movement in French cinema which is concerned with investigating how the liberal establishment and globalisation are impacting on the idea of home and national identity. They both share a concern with the fragmentation of the family, both as an individual unit and as a microcosm of the wider community. That they investigate such themes without tendentious sermonising or judgement of their subjects is to their great credit. That they are also beautiful, affectionate and thoroughly intelligent is a miracle. Let's hope that, unlike the world receding into the sunset in Modern Life's rapturous final shot, this kind of filmmaking goes on for a long time to come.
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