My Afternoons with Marguerite

Gérard Depardieu is a
towering figure in the French cinema, a fact belied by his Falstaffian girth,
which is now rivaling late-period Orson Welles. His stature has only grown,
even as in recent years he’s increasingly taken to lighter fare; at least at
work, if not at the dinner table. Here he grounds a particularly airy soufflé
of a film, lending gravity to subject matter that could have easily floated
away on the trip from the page to the screen.

Depardieu stars as Germain, a
lovable buffoon in a bucolic little French town where everybody seems to know
your name, and intimate personal details. He shuffles along through life
blissfully ignorant, getting by as a handyman and selling vegetables from his
garden at the weekend market, while living in a trailer next door to his
miserable, cranky shrew of a mother. He willingly acts the gregarious fool, because
no one expects much of him, not his boozy chums down at the pub, or his
charming, patient and entirely too young for him, bus driver girlfriend (Sophie
Guillemin). The only one concerned with nurturing the wounded soul inside
Germain’s hulking frame, is a delicately lovely and frail retiree named
Marguerite (graceful, 97-year-old Gisele Casadesus), who shares his love of
watching pigeons from a park bench. While the big galoot has never had much
interest in reading himself, Marguerite thinks he’s a great listener, and
starts reading to him from, of all books, Camus’ The Plague. As soon as
you can say cliché, our bumpkin embraces literature, and begins to find the
long missing self-confidence stripped away by a lifetime of abuse and
belittling.

This is as mainstream as
French filmmaking gets, amiably romantic and enjoyable, yet still infused with
a soupcon of rueful philosophy to cut the sweetness. In this country, the same
faintly hokey material would’ve screamed Hallmark channel tripe, and stunk of
potpourri and Jessica Tandy’s dying breath. Depardieu wills the story forward,
even as it meanders through flashbacks and sidetracks, and the force of his
charm is undeniable. Slight as the film is, director Jean Becker has perfectly
calibrated all the elements, and like rind of Brie and a good baguette,
sometimes the simplest ingredients can work wonders.

This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2011.