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chezmax1937: The Life of Emile Zola
[Zip.ca] [IMDB] [Wikipedia]
As a somewhat fictionalized biographical film, this film starts out somewhat slowly and weakly, chronicling the life of French author Émile Zola, in the latter half of the 19th century.
Starting out as a starving author in Paris, with his flatmate Paul Cézanne, his rise to fame is depicted, becoming a wealthy, respected, and influential author.
The latter half of the film centers on Zola's involvement in the Dreyfuss Affair, a political scandal involving the military and the wrongful imprisonment of a certain Alfred Dreyfus, who was convicted of treason sentenced to solitary life imprisonment off the coast of French Guiana for allegedly leaking military secrets.
Zola goes onto condemn the French Government in his famous open letter J'accuse in a newspaper, and is then tried for libel.
Without giving away the entire movie, the latter half of the movie is quite good, centering on the miscarriages of justice and showing the corruption of the military and french government around the turn of the 20th century. The acting, in particular, is quite believable, and the actor chosen to play Zola bears a striking resemblance to the real Zola. This portion of the movie also appears to fairly true to reality in terms of the events, and makes for a an interesting pseudo-documentary of the times.
[Zip.ca] [IMDB] [Wikipedia]
As a somewhat fictionalized biographical film, this film starts out somewhat slowly and weakly, chronicling the life of French author Émile Zola, in the latter half of the 19th century.
Starting out as a starving author in Paris, with his flatmate Paul Cézanne, his rise to fame is depicted, becoming a wealthy, respected, and influential author.
The latter half of the film centers on Zola's involvement in the Dreyfuss Affair, a political scandal involving the military and the wrongful imprisonment of a certain Alfred Dreyfus, who was convicted of treason sentenced to solitary life imprisonment off the coast of French Guiana for allegedly leaking military secrets.
Zola goes onto condemn the French Government in his famous open letter J'accuse in a newspaper, and is then tried for libel.
Without giving away the entire movie, the latter half of the movie is quite good, centering on the miscarriages of justice and showing the corruption of the military and french government around the turn of the 20th century. The acting, in particular, is quite believable, and the actor chosen to play Zola bears a striking resemblance to the real Zola. This portion of the movie also appears to fairly true to reality in terms of the events, and makes for a an interesting pseudo-documentary of the times.
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