From its title to the age-defying friendship at its core, the French import My Afternoons With Margueritte has the Chicken Soup odor of Tuesdays With Morrie.
Directed by movie-of-the-week sentimentalist Jean Becker (Conversations With My Gardener), it follows a similar emotional journey as Mitch Albom’s breakthrough, charting the developing relationship between a lonely, barely literate fruit vendor (Gerard Depardieu) and the lonely and very literate nonagenarian of the title (Gisele Casadesus), whom he encounters by – where else? — a park bench, that perennial rendezvous for inspiration-seeking lost souls.
They bond over pigeons, and she reads him Camus. The next time he hangs out with his friends, Depardieu’s Germain Chazes surprises everyone by referencing the French existentialist’s The Plague in colloquial conversation, the first step in his intellectual turnaround. Germain and Margueritte gradually change each other’s lives, though forces beyond their control come to threaten their kinship.
To his credit, Becker curbs the story’s potentially excessive sap, relying more on his own screenplay (co-written with Jean-Loup Dabadie) than the manipulative crutches of a cloying score or mawkish acting. Depardieu is fine, if unchallenged, in the part, which consists mostly of listening to Margueritte read, fuming under his breath and waddling under his girth. Casadesus is charming, her elegance tempered with a resignation of the inevitability of aging and the problems it will soon cause.
The film is as its strongest with it flashes back to Germain’s childhood – a painful upbringing defined by hectoring teachers, a mentally abusive mother, a physically abusive stepfather and his own awkward coming-of-age. All of these triggers paint a lucid picture of the childhood traumas that impacted Germain, and they help to define his lack of self-confidence and his anxieties about fatherhood (he has a patient, unlikely girlfriend played by Sophie Guillemin).
My Afternoons with Margueritte is a pleasant provincial movie for mass audiences of a certain age. Directed and shot with simple anonymity, it’s not high art by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s best enjoyed as a matinee over tea and cookies. It’s not out to hurt anybody, and there’s nothing really wrong with it, if you like this sort of thing.
But it’s a completely contained movie, packaged for easy export and tidily composed with a ribbon on top. It leaves you with very little to think about when you exit the theater; the process of forgetting this disposable movie begins as soon as the end credits start scroll across the screen.
I’ve grumbled, and will continue to grumble, that these are the kind of foreign-language movies that arrive in semi-wide releases in South Florida, not the provocative works by art-house masters. If Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme is an urbane, five-star French restaurant an hour’s drive away, My Afternoons With Margueritte is a Paul food stand in your local mall: You get what you pay for.
MY AFTERNOONS WITH MARGUERITTE (LA TETE EN FRICHE). Cast: Gerard Depardieu, Gisele Casadesus, Maurane, Jean-François Stévenin, François-Xavier Demaison, Claire Maurier, Sophie Guillemin; Director: Jean Becker; Distributor: Cohen Media Group; Rating: Not rated; in French with English subtitles; Opens: Friday at Movies of Delray and the Tower Theatre in Miami