Claude Berri

Claude Berri directed nine of the ten films the catalogue holds for him, and yet what the archive has to say about him looks past the directing altogether, to his producing and to one guest appearance. Geoffrey Macnab writes that the film under his review, like most of those Berri's name is mixed up in as a producer, is lavish and carefully detailed. The critic taking on Va savoir reports that he turns up there as a historian and counts the cameo mischievous, since Berri, as director and as producer both, stands for the precise opposite of Jacques Rivette's cinema. Peter Matthews, for his part, makes Germinal the measure of the polished heritage picture the audience expects: anyone arriving at Zola with that expectation will, on his account, come away as though poisoned.