EVEN MORE FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL

Patrice Leconte’s first theatrical film in 5 years, Depardieu as Inspector Maigret - this was always going to be an event. It asserts, despite lacking many of the features of the standard French policier.

Leconte, a devotee of author Simenon, sees Maigret as “une personne emblematique.” The movies have provided us a small army of Inspector Maigrets. Depardieu is the newest in a line winding back to Abel Taride in his brother Jean‘s 1932 Le chien jaune / The Yellow Dog. French directors seem to have liked putting their brothers in the role. Jean Renoir got Pierre to front his La nuit du carrefour -  followed by Albert Préjean, Charles Laughton, a cheery Jean Gabin, Jean Richard, Bruno Cremer, along with implausible TV Britons, Rupert Davies, Michael Gambon and, would you believe, Rowan Atkinson.

Maigret is a dour detective. He doesn’t carry a gun and ride in a police car with a screaming siren. When he needs to travel here, Depardieu takes taxis. As he explains, he doesn’t interrogate suspects by beating them with a telephone book. What he does is listen to people. It makes a hard act to follow. Refuse all substitutes - that’s you Hercule Poirot and Columbo!

What the current film offers is an aged Maigret, like Harry Baur from the formidable Duvivier La tête d’un homme,  still the character’s best incarnation. Gross Depardieu is now barely recognisable as the energetic juvenile of Les Valseuses and the Truffaut films. The currently scandal plagued actor is a resonant match with the character, which we can add to his Great French Movie Star catalogue - Jean Valjean, Cyrano, the Count of Monte Cristo.

Actor and role both evoke a long and demanding work life. This Maigret is first seen being told by his doctor to give up his signature pipe smoking to spare his heart. Throughout the film, he is greeted by characters who he encountered in investigations he now barely remembers. Anne Loiret’s Mme Maigret mentions the couple’s grown daughter, which further motivates Depardieu’s interest in his new case - echoed in the resonant scene with André Wilms describing the devastating effect of an offspring’s death, which has no other function in the plot.

This all motivates Depardieu’s intervention in the life of Jade Labeste, one of the case’s miserable girl victims, who contrast with the drunken privileged class crowd found celebrating by singing “C’est si bon”, that avenger Depardieu faces with his damning coup du théatre.

They drop in odd Simenon detail like Maigret only drinkling one brand of liquor during each case. Though Lukas and Janvier are marginal in the film’s constant engulfing shadow, we do get a telling scene in Police-Secours with its light-up wall map of Paris, introduced by the shattering of a call box glass.

The film claims to be adapted from “Maigret et la jeune morte” but many of that one’s features have been ditched, including the rival Inspector  (think Philo Vance’s hapless Segeant Sgt. Ernest Heath and quite a few more). Discovering the killer is replaced with elements of “Maigret tend un piège.”  As a detective story, Maigret is unremarkable with the outcome telegraphed from our first glimpse of matron Aurore Clement peering from the background.

The film opens with Clara Antoons naked and vulnerable, as it turns out for an evening dress fitting. We see her arrival produce consternation at a society engagement reception and shortly later her disfigured body is found in a public square. Depardieu doubles back to take the call and we cut to her body being turned over.

His inquiries reveal the film’s real core, the murky, evocative universe of author Simenon’s crime stories, the luxury homes of the well to do and to the miserable accommodation of peniless girls. Though subtly placed by details - the big china coffee mugs, the no handle loup magnifyer with which Depardieu examines the event photos, they only run to one vintage car. There are no street vistas with authentic traffic and extras in period costume. We hear about the train station but when Jade Labeste makes her departure it is from a grubby bus depot. The home of Jules Maigret, Inspecteur brigade criminel, Quai des orfevres 36, as Depardieu announces himself, is is a Paris without bateaux mouches and the Champs-Elysées. It’s streets are as mean as anything Philip Marlowe ever went down.

The downbeat material is relentless. Depardieu asks the reception hall manager whether a table cloth like the one the body was found wrapped in went missing and is told that, where silver wear is routinely stolen, they haven’t bothered to check the linen. A victim of a lesbian procuress observes “I should have kept the money.” The coroner describes the mutilation the duck they will have for diner was subjected to.

 Patrice Leconte’s  film deliberately references cinema with a visit to Studio Billancourt where Antoon’s roommate Mélanie Bernier, in front of the painted decor, comments everything is false. The ending repeats the device used strikingly with Louise Brooks in Prix de beauté and Carol Landis in I Wake Up Screaming, where characters watch a film of the now dead victim.  Maigret constantly recalls perversely resonant moments from other movies. Dress maker Elizabeth Bourgine, shown her creation soaked in the life’s blood of it’s owner, comments that it’s sad to see her work treated so badly, recalling  Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Frenzy telling her rapist and killer “Don’t tear the dress”. We saw the story of young girls arriving in Paris with a suitcase in La rozière des Halles, Dactylo and Club des femmes. It is part of the film’s scheme that rather than finding a colourful artist’s garret, she ends in a miserable room up the six flights of stairs which both the aged Maigret and the housekeeper negotiate reluctantly. Rather than a scenic interlude, Depardieu walking with Jade Labeste by the Seine has him recall his first murder where he couldn’t forget the girl victim drowned in the river. It’s like Al Pacino in Sea of Love, telling Ellen Barkin that they are passing buildings where he investigated killings, transforming the ordinary street into a haunted setting.

It would be interesting to know how much of this citation is conscious.

Maigret is a milestone in the history of it’s star, director and long dead author. The final image emptying to leave the grim Paris alley way is an indicator of it’s intent.  I’ll be surprised if the so far excellent French Film Festival can come up with anything better.

Curiously French critics, who see Leconte as a light weight, despite pieces like his other Simenon subject M. Hire or his imposing La veuve de saint Pierre, have been largely unsympathetic.

A few months back Jérôme (Anthony Zimmer) Salle’s new Kompromat would have looked like a bit of formulaic Ruskie bashing, harking back to the Crimean campaign. At the moment, it plays like topical contemporary issues drama.

Gilles Lelouche works hard as the family man Alliance Française director on Irkutsk station in Siberia. His productive life proves to be a sham. Gilles’ wife plans on leaving him and the ballet he books as a local theatre attraction works out as gay men wrestling half naked in red light. The local hunting fan sponsor is not amused.

Before he knows what is happening, the fur hat cops are marching Gilles, doubled over by hands cuffed behind his back out of the house in front of his terrified daughter, and his wife has made a video deposition claiming he’s a pedophile who flogs kiddie porn on the net.

The cell full of tattooed bald men susses that he’s on a 424 sex crime warrant and beat him up, causing him to be shifted to solitary where he chokes on his bread and water. His French diplomat associates get him “le meilleur avocat au cité” who proves to have limited English and outlines the grim fate awaiting Gilles now that he has run foul of FSB, successor to the KGB, who have faked his incriminating Kompromat dossier.

Things pick up when supermart bags of groceries with a smiley face receipt arrive in his cell before the lawyer proves smarter than he looks and gets Gilles release to home detention with an ankle bracelet - no phone, no net, no contact with people associated with the case. Using a bit of ingenuity our hero finds out that the groceries came from Joanna Kulig, a girl he danced with at the show’s after-party. She is as conspicuous here, in an underwritten role, as she was in Cold War.

Kompromat - Kullig & Lellouche.

Faced with fifteen years in a Russian slammer, Gilles takes the advice the lawyer confides while the kitchen appliance drowns out the room’s surveillance bug and does the runner we’ve already seen in the pre-title.

The escape has a few inventive touches - the cell phone on the long distance coach is nice and Gilles outfoxing his pursuers gives us an interesting glimpse of diplomatic assistance in action. However it’s disturbing to see the featured use of cell phones, which should have given the game away. Kulic’s one legged Chechen war veteran husband is also a promising element but his character is poorly deployed. A traveling Orthodox Patriarch is better but the action material is implausible.

The suggestion that Gilles must really be a spy because of all the attention he’s getting and his skill in dealing with the blundering secret policemen has a spurious plausibility. ”What does a spy look like?”

The film is well made and the cast are good but the film they prop up is old fashioned and unconvincing - even though we are assured that it’s “loosely” based on reality.

This one is the only disappointment I’ve had out of the French Film Festival so far.

 

Emmanuel Carrère’s Ouistreham / Between Two Worlds is a challenge because it’s hard to say anything about it without giving away the revelation which sets it up, though the publicity and reviews don’t feel inhibited about that.

The opening establishes an unfamiliar setting where we see Juliette Binoche lost in the confusion of the French coastal Caen social security office, where a woman indignant about the her missing paper work jostles her out of her turn with the case worker. Juliette accounts for the gap in her work record as representing a failed marriage.

We see her interviewing for a bottom of the employment ladder spot - no insurance, no holidays, no security. After one dismissal, she ends up sharing the shuttle bus with the women who clean the Ouistreham ferry. The scenes of mastering the rapid turnaround methods and the company of the fellow women cleaners are vivid and make the best element of the film.

Part of the authenticity is that Juliette is the only professional in the cast. She blends in impeccably. The others are the real deal. They even come up with a transgender worker whose farewell party is a highlight. The casting director must have lit a candle in thanks.

The film making is accomplished. The business of the women snatching any happiness that happens to present is new and involving and the night time port setting (again) makes for striking images.

However Ouistreham has a personal rather than social agenda and when they lay this out things become less interesting. It ends up being the movie where we see the admirable Binoche clean toilets.

Barrie Pattison 2022