Born into a family of farmers in Haute-Loire, a remote region of southern France, Raymond Depardon went to Paris at the age of 16 to escape his destiny as a farmer’s son. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and filmmaker has since traveled the world. More than a decade ago, however, he felt the urge to return to his origins and began filming the dairy farmers who cling to their fading way of life in the isolated highlands.
The end result is Depardon’s austere yet rewarding triptych Profils Paysans. Modern Life (La Vie Moderne) serves as the masterful coda to the series.
Drifting through the seasons, the stunning traveling shots take both the audience and filmmaker back to the aging inhabitants who appear in Profils Paysans: L’Approche (2001) and Le Quotidien (2005). The Privat family once again plays a central role. Octogenarian brothers Marcel and Raymond still tend sheep and cattle, though the herds diminish and their health declines. The arrival of Cecile, their nephew’s new wife, further complicates matters as the unmarried brothers feel uncomfortable with the presence of this strong-willed woman from the outside world. Other subjects include middle-aged Daniel Roy, the only child from a family of six who stays on the farm, though he constantly and inarticulately expresses his displeasure towards farming life.
Depardon resists sentimentality, and his respect for his subjects shines through patient camera work. Long takes frame farmers in the same manner as classical portraiture would, where taciturn men and women are given space to pause, breathe and sit mute. The filmmaker doesn’t interrogate, nor attempt to milk stories to support a thesis. Simple questions are asked. Sometimes there are answers, sometimes nothing but silence.
Depardon’s less-is-more approach reveals as much about what is being said verbally as its does about what is being conveyed through the uneasy body language of the farmers. His sympathy for them is deeply felt and delivers a sense of geniality without which the film would have been uncomfortable to watch.
Though it is impossible to overlook the film’s fatalism, the veteran filmmaker commendably resists the temptation to paint an elegy on the demise of family farms and the ancient way of life. Rather than generalizing and formulating clear-cut issues and messages, Depardon quietly sits with the farmers and allows them to speak for themselves.
Last year’s winner of the Prix Louis-Delluc, the prestigious award that honors the best French film of the year, Modern Life is another piece of resonant and poignant work of Depardon’s distinctive filmmaking suffused with humanism and compassion.
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