Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Review Tuesday: 'My Afternoons with Margueritte'

Today’s ‘Review Tuesday’. My Sweetheart Vivienne won two free tickets to My Afternoons with Margueritte [1, 2, 3] – a 2010 subtitled French film starring Gerard Depardieu. We saw it last Thursday evening – at the end of my ‘4-hour delay day’ [4]. It’s the story of an improbable friendship between Depardieus character Germain (a 50-year-old uneducated, minimally literate and seemingly oafish builders labourer) and Margueritte (a cultured, bookish, prim 90-year-old lady). By chance the two meet on a park bench. Germain counts the pigeons, and he’s named all 19. Margueritte’s fascinated by them too. Their friendship blossoms. Each gives; and each takes. But we see him develop more. Maybe because his baseline’s lower. Though this movie’s a hybrid of My Fair Lady, Being There and Tuesdays with Maurie, it benefits from its intergenerational dimension. At its end – which comes unexpectedly without being unexpected – tears were streaming down Sweetheart Vivienne’s and my cheeks. We both felt cheated of a few more scenes – to show us what happened next. And that, I reckon, is the hallmark of a fine film. My view, as a semi-neoluddite from backwoods Tasmania, is that the current plethora of so-called social media contributes little if anything to our ability to form meaningful relationships and develop them over time. My Afternoons with Margueritte is a model relationship case-study: sensitive, languid and joyous. Though I saw it gratis, it gave me so much it would’ve been worth the admission price. It’s a wonderful film. I rate it four stars.

1 comment:

Chris Burrows said...

Improbable friends just might be the best kind as there is so much to learn from each other. I'll watch out for it and get clean hankies out!