My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010)

Why so much hype?

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

A sweet trifle of a film, taken to a deeper and richer level by two outstanding performances. Gerard Depardieu, in what must be his 6,000th film still feels fresh and alive as the overweight, under educated and well meaning laborer who can hardly read, and who strikes up a chance friendship with the 94 year old Margueritte, played with amazing delicacy and life force by the wonderful Gisele Casadesus, who was an astounding 95 herself when this was made. Oh that we all should live so long with such grace. Marguritte begins reading to the quasi-literate Germain, who finds his interest in reading sparked, and with it an expanded sense of self. He even finds himself falling in love (in a chaste almost childlike way) with the still beautiful Margueritte. Simplistic, sure, sentimental, undoubtedly. But much like Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman in 'Driving Miss Daisy' these two actors give performances that make you want to forgive anything that might otherwise feel trite or too on the nose (e.g. the very literal flashbacks to Germain's childhood). Not quite a great film, but a charming, sweet, life-affirming and very human one.

Jean Becker would never be able to make a living as a filmmaker in America. This should not be taken as a critique of him as a filmmaker, rather as a critique of America. This thought came into my mind as I sat virtually alone (with 2 others) in a 200 seat theatre, located in a booming city of over a million, on a Sunday evening, during the first week's release of his latest film MY AFTERNOONS WITH MARGUERITTE. How sad it is to see such a film virtually unnoticed here in the states. Oh well,....The film tells the story of Germain, played very subtly by Depardieu, who is a gentle giant, a bit slow, but lovable. He lives with an abusive mother, makes a living doing odd jobs around town, spends his free time gardening and drinking with his friends, has a girlfriend whom he adores, and is very much content with his life. One day he meets Margueritte, a woman of 95, sitting alone in the park, reading and feeding the pigeons. A friendship blossoms. They have conversations, exchanging their views on life, she reads to him and even persuades him to pick up a book himself.Marguerite is content with life, although lonely. She lives at a home for the aged, paid for by a distant relative. Germain gives her a companion, someone to share with the ups and downs of everyday life. She has seen and done much and now is ready to live out the rest of her days quietly. The ending of the film is quite wonderful and I will not spoil it for the reader. Like the ending of Becker's last widely released film CONVERSATIONS WITH MY GARDNER, it may appear to be overly sentimental. It shouldn't. It would be wonderful if more movies ended in such an upbeat way, celebrating life and the joys that simple human kindness can create.As I try to go back over the film's many details, I find in it so much beauty and wisdom, the kind that is so much needed, but missing from modern life...

This review was made following an afternoon screening at Cambridge Film Festival (September 2010): If you do not take to what, for me, is simply a gloriously delightful style of French film (very much in the spirit of a previous hit at the festival Conversations With My Gardener, whose name is even evoked by this feature's English title), my positive reception will not be understood. However, I gauge from the applause (at the re-run) that it was well received.Nevertheless, although people might have laughed quietly to themselves at largely gentle humour (but interspersed with varying levels of sometimes overt discrimination and even abuse), and, unless one has half an ear to the original language, reading words off the screen can put one a beat or more behind, I judged that some of it was being lost.What certainly also didn't come over in the subtitles was the old-fashioned purity of expression of Margueritte's French (and so the beauty that I heard in it as a contrast with Germain's and that of most of the others), and there is definitely nothing left of the original title's intimation of a mind that is lying dormant (until she awakes it). Other translations gave a different feeling to the content of the original dialogue, and one text that was recited aloud, not least when it had been shown as sought out as easier to read, seemed more opaque than the others.There is much in common with Conversations, such as the generosity of the motives (and the utter lack of condescension where it most matters), and even the fact that both of the less well-educated characters have green fingers. (As in that case, I am inclined to look out the book from which this film was adapted.) There was additionally a similar feeling of hurt (though greater here) between comparing the results of different educations (and, in the case of Conversations, lifestyles), particularly one that had penalised Germain and ridiculed him time and again in front of everyone else, and continued to do so.He was only to be redeemed, in the scope of our time with him, by the insight of the two women in his life, who could clearly see his generosity and loveableness for their true worth. In the case of each relationship, respect on both sides is felt for the other, and companionship and friendship are seen as valued responses to the sharing of experiences that have hitherto been alien to that person's world. Finally, though not wishing to push the resemblance too far, but there is a final (and crucial) link in the matter of inheritance, which, in the case of Conversations, brought about the circumstances of the story, and here altered them.Each film shows something of what matters about being human, when the pettiness, anger and competitiveness of life are stripped away. I know that I will, as I did with Conversations, be coming back to My Afternoons, and I fully expect that attention to be well repaid.

Jean Becker is unquestionably a poet of rural France as time after time, film after film, he celebrates the hinterland in much the same way as Marcel Pagnol used to do. Above all - again like Pagnol - his characters have warmth, charm, heart - and those are only the heavies. This time around he has cast Gerard Depardiu as an illeterate oak though lovable with it. Although he has his share of friends in the rural community he is often the butt of their jokes but given the gorgeous much younger girlfriend he has acquired the laugh is surely on them. One day sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons he stumbles on a charming elderly lady whose idea of light reading is Camus' The Plague. They strike up a friendship and are soon meeting daily and Depardieu is absorbing culture by osmosis. That's pretty much it but it is done superbly not least by Giselle Casadesus, who really was born in 1914 or three years before Danielle Darrieux who is also still working. British reviewers seem to think Casadesus is a newcomer yet she has been working for years not least in Becker's Les Enfants du Marais and Valerie Lemercier's Palais Royal. This is a wonderful film that I can't recommend highly enough.