Modern Life is tribute to vanishing world

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Depardon, travelling in his car down empty country roads before landing up at one desolate farm after another, never asks questions about rural depopulation and factory farming, but leaves his farmers to speak for themselves. It is often like getting blood out of a stone but the thrust remains clear: the old way of life is vanishing in front of his eyes.

The stark beauty of the countryside matches the gnarled and weather-beaten faces. Stoicism is the order of the day as one veteran couple, whom Depardon revisits for a second time after a year, tell of decimated livestock, while two brothers, both over 80, watch as their nephew and his new wife from Calais take over their dairy.

They are not opposed to him but when a cow they have named, and whose personality they know well, lies dying from mastitis they can’t understand the younger couple’s seeming indifference.

At the end of the film Depardon tells us that he’ll speak out about "my love of farmers and their land". Yet his film does so with a small, eloquent voice — though a few more facts wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Modern Life (La Vie Moderne)