My Afternoons with Margueritte

My Afternoons with Margueritte (La Tete en Frise), Dir. Jean Becker. Gerard Depardieu.

In Portsmouth we don't necessarily get the latest French films immediately on their release here but the no.6 cinema in the dockyard provides a fine service in bringing them to us in due course and we are grateful for that.

It is a venue that deserves support and I am unstinting in my continuing patronage of it by turning up at least once a year.

Depardieu has had his moments of controversy, in recent years wearing an ear piece on stage to save him learning his lines or offering the opinion that Juliette Binoche has achieved more success than her talent warranted. He perhaps doesn't suffer fools gladly but on film he has a ravishing charm and charisma- and there's considerably more of him than there used to be- that keeps me at least on vague acquaintance with the interior of a cinema.

In this gentle comedy he is Germain, uneducated and barely literate, the butt of bar room humour among his drinking friends, who has names for the pigeons in the park where he immediately, as we join his story, meets Margueritte, a 95 year old lady who introduces him to the pleasures of reading, beginning with the reasonably highbrow text of La Peste by Albert Camus.

It is perhaps a bit unlikely. Not only that two such characters should make such devoted friends but that the village idiot should have a girlfriend, played by Maurane, that you suspect might be too good for him. But it is not social realism and much of the humour translated well enough, beginning with a joke on the Guide Michelin and Guide Maupassant, which is beyond Germain and his struggle to make proper use of a dictionary.

But in the best tradition of French film, it leads us to reflect on love and its various possibilities. There will be those who will say it's a sentimental old tale of little import and they are welcome to their point of view but with it's shabby deshabillement (if there is such a word), and the parts of his mother, wayward when young and crazy in old age, it is simply 'feel good' in a way that doesn't require intellectual analysis. Germain does the right thing by the old lady that he loves in a very real way, and there's a happy future immediately ahead of the main characters in an ending which brings it all together neatly and without stretching it out or dwelling on it.

I got my money's worth by being moved despite myself, which is what Depardieu consistently does for me, my favourite actor in a class of his own.