Butler's Cinema Scene

Gerarde Depardieu and Gisele Casadesus

“MY AFTERNOONS WITH MARGUERITTE” My rating: B- (Opening Oct. 21 at the Rio and Glenwood at Red Bridge)

82 minutes | No MPAA rating

“My Afternoons with Margueritte” is the sort of enterprise calculated to warm cockles, tug heartstrings and evoke dry retching among cynics.

In this Gallic equivalent of a Hallmark Hall of Fame production, a none-too-bright oaf has a sort of chaste romance with a 96-year-old woman who encourages him to open up his narrowly proscribed world through books.

It’s a shameless manipulative setup that director Jean Becker and cowriter Jean-Loup Dabadie have cooked up, and by all rights it should land with a thud.

That it doesn’t is entirely due to the film’s two stars, Gerard Depardieu (huge in every sense of the word) and Gisele Casadesus (who, incredibly, began her screen career in 1934). This couple could sell space heaters to Amazonian aborigines.

Germain (Depardieu) is a bib-overall-wearing handyman who seems to have rarely ventured more than a few blocks away from his birthplace in a small provincial town. Thick and barely literate, he’s viewed the village idiot and is often the target of cruel jibes. In some largely unnecessary flashbacks to his childhood we see him being humiliated by teachers, classmates and especially his witheringly disdainful single mother.

One day in the local park to visit the pigeons he considers his unofficial pets, he meets Margueritte (Casadesus), who lives in a nearby retirement home. She’s intelligent and refined and a voracious reader, and bit by bit she encourages the largely non-reading Germain to take another stab at books.

Against their growing friendship Becker paints a varied portrait of village life and the small-town personalities who congregate at the local bar.

Wildly improbable, though, is Germain’s romance with a blue-eyed, baby-faced bus driver half his age (Sophie Guillemin). What does she see in him?  And our man still has to deal with his aged mother (Claire Maurier), whose encroaching dementia hasn’t made her any less caustic.

But as was stated earlier, Depardieu and Casadesus take this sow’s ear and, if not exactly turning it into a silk purse, at least wrestle it into a functional wallet.

| Robert W. Butler