The Life of Emile Zola

The Life of Emile Zola

1937

Brush your teeth! Clean your room! Look both ways before you cross the road. Be nice to others. These are all common things that your mother would tell you to do as a child. Others include share your toys and be sure to always tell the truth. The latter I am sure was repeated to Emile Zola many a time by his own mother when he was young.

Emile Zola was a real life person, just for those of you who didn’t know that. He was a French writer in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. Now that we have those boring yet necessary details out of the way, I can tell you about his life! Yay!

Zola started out as this person who was so poor he had to stuff the cracks in his windows with dirty rags, as he couldn’t afford new windows. He lived with a fellow poor dude, some artist whose name I don’t remember. I could look it up, but I’m lazy and he’s not all that important anyway. They love to complain to each other how messed up society is, how no one writes the truth about how messed up society is, how everyone would rather have perfumed lies than the smelly truth about society, and on and on, blah blah blah. As they are complaining, they decide to burn some of the books they have that they disagree with. Unimportant man suggests they sell them because as you should remember, these people are dirt poor. But nope! Zola says they should BUUUUUUURRRRRN! And so they do.

Of course, these people are stupid and don’t open a window, causing their whole apartment to fill with smoke. Zola then spazzes out, thinking he’s going to die from asphyxiation or something. Wimp. He becomes paranoid about this very thing many times throughout the movie.

Anyway, he goes on to get a job, write a gazillion novels, grows a beard and gets fat. He moves into this fancy house and life is all good for him now. This all happens in roughly ten minutes of the movie, so I am not condensing it that much, trust me.

Now that he’s all rich from writing scathing things, exposing truth in France, his friend doesn’t really like him anymore and goes away forever. Oh well. Unimportant guy was boring anyway!

For the next thirty so minutes of the movie, we hear nothing about Zola. Apparently he’s not all that significant. It’s not like the movie is named after him and his life or anything. We focus on a soldier in French army named Dreyfus (Not Richard Dreyfuss, just to clarify for everyone, myself included). He is accused of treason for writing this list that involves guns and probably something else but I wasn’t really paying attention to it so obviously it’s not something worth remembering! Of course, Dreyfus is innocent. This is a fact no one cares about. So they send him away to Devil’s Island for a time long enough to turn his hair grey.

One of the colonel’s later finds the real traitor, but it doesn’t matter. Someone already is doing time for it, and actually telling the truth that they got the wrong guy would make the army look bad. The honor of the army is totally more important than truth. The French are such sensible people! I am never sarcastic!

We finally meet up with Zola again when Madame Dreyfus calls on him to write about how her husband is innocent and France is handling the whole affair horridly. Always searching for the truth, he agrees.

Because the French are stupid and their justice system is super screwy, Zola winds up guilty of libel and is sentenced to jail for a year. However, his lawyer advises he run away to England, where he can do more good for Dreyfus by continuing to write, and Zola agrees.

After another few years, or months, the movie wasn’t very clear on this, new people come in to power, and set everything straight on the Dreyfus affair. All the people responsible commit suicide and Dreyfus is returned to his officerness. Yay him!

Finally, it is safe for him to return to France, and Zola begins to write his “greatest work yet!” Engrossed, he leaves the stove on while furiously writing it, and ends up dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. Teehee. So funny. The end!

As I reread this, I realize I made this movie sound slightly ridiculous. However, I promise, it really isn’t! This was an engaging story. The injustice of the Dreyfus affair will, hopefully, anger you, especially since it actually happened. This was a rare film that actually had my full attention for more than two thirds of the movie. The first part was a little boring, but nothing is perfect in life. Except for me, of course, but I figured everyone already knew that. Even though this movie came out seventy four years ago, it doesn’t feel dated, it just feels wonderful.