Le Brasier (1991)
Directed by Eric Barbier

Film Review

This first full-length film from director Eric Barbier is certainly an ambitious effort but it is weighed down by the enormity of its subject.  The film has strong similarities with Claude Berri's even more ambitious 1993 film Germinal, which is also centred around a mining community and touches on similar themes, albeit in an earlier period of history.  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, Le Brasier is visually 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 design front 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.

Le Brasier's overriding fault, however, is its obvious lack of focus.  The film 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 style over substance (a fault of many French film directors in the 1980s), the result is overall somewhat disappointing. Barbier's subsequent output is no more impressive and includes the stylish but fairly vacuous thrillers Le Serpent (2007) and Le Dernier diamant (2014).

Film Synopsis

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...