MODERN LIFE France, 2008. (Cont.)
Wednesday, 18th November 2009

(Cont.)
Both Claudine and Raymond were asked what new revelations about farming life had come to them during the ten years of filming. Claudine’s reply was this: “I didn’t think rural life could be so precarious, even though the situation has improved somewhat in the last ten years. I didn’t know it could be so difficult economically, that it could be so lonely.” For his part, Raymond adds this: “I think, in the end, they’re a lot like us, these people who are now in a minority but are very contemporary – more so than I thought. That is why Modern Life is a film rooted in the present. It is not nostalgic, even if it is the memory of our farm in Garet that gave me the energy to make it. It is not a “disappearing world” or a “separate world”, it is a world that is not unlike our own. They don’t expect anything from anyone anymore. They know that they can only count on themselves. Like us.”

In some respects Raymond Depardon may be too optimistic: it would not be difficult to imagine the traditional farming life shown here fading away. If so, this film will become a fully achieved memorial to an important aspect of French life, and the way in which it draws in the audience and thus encourages us without any sense of manipulation to feel for the problems being faced by those in the film renders it an exceptional human document as well as an historic one. Modern Life will surely come to be recognised as a classic of cinema.
Programme Note by Mansel Stimpson.