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 Depardieu’s 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.

farmdoc's blog post number 20

In Mole Creek winter is nigh. Almost all the leaves have fallen from our deciduous trees – mainly sycamores, some fruit trees. The orchard’s fruit trees are young and so not fully productive. But no matter, because around here there are many established fruit trees – mainly apples, some plums – on public land, so their fruit is available to all. This year their yield was especially bountiful and scrumptious – which pleased me, and also our goats and a couple of neighbourhood horses whom I treated with windfall apples. Our goats have all but eradicated blackberry from our land. But the roadside blackberry brambles were prolific this year. Just because ‘The best things in life are free’ (the title of a 1927 song) is a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true. My family know me as careful with money if not downright parsimonious, so they would expect me to be delighted with free fruit from public trees. And I am. I savour the concept of something sold in a shop, being available gratis a few hundred metres from that shop. So when I pick fruit from public trees, I am thumbing my nose at a world in which everything that can be commodified and monetarised, has been. Almost. This ‘almost’ makes me warm inside, as winter is nigh.