Focus on: May Day

• Published in: Canadian dimension 2005-05, Vol.39 (3), p.52
• Main Author: Slye, Rick
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Left (Political science); Motion pictures; Movies
• ISSN: 0008-3402

[Claude Berri]'s version of Emile Zola's overwhelming novel of class war in the coalfields of 1880s northern France is remarkably true to its source, with amazing performances throughout. Read the book (it is still in print as a Penguin paperback) and you'll be even more impressed with this adaptation. When Zola died in 1902, his funeral cortege was followed by massed contingents of coal miners who chanted "Germinal! Germinal!" The book, as well as this marvelous film, will tell you why. [Mike Leigh]'s continual searching in the rubble of Thatcherite England for signs of life produced this gem of working-class endurance and its capacity for renewal as a revolutionary movement on the other side of betrayed social democracy. Cyril and Shirley are two veterans of radical politics of the late sixties and seventies whose lives reflect the contradictory radicalism and cynicism of the bleak years of the late eighties. Their trip to Marx's grave, one of the finest scenes in all of Leigh's work, brilliantly evokes these contradictions, as well as the impossibility of avoiding Marx's ineluctable challenge. The difficulties of holding onto radical ideals may be daunting, but, as Leigh shows in some hilarious and horrifying scenes, the acceptable (Thatcherite) alternatives are truly frightening. Cyril's sister and her carsalesman husband are pathetic, deranged examples of the attempt to move into the middle class through conspicuous consumption. Cyril's mom's yuppie neighbours want nothing more than to force her to move out so their friends can "gentrify" the remaining old council houses on her block. They are ferociously satirized as vapid, upper-class twits on the crest of a new barbarian invasion of working-class London. Things may get worse, Leigh seems to say, but the radical history embedded in the relationship of Cyril and Shirley is the only real hope for the future of Britain.