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.

Maurie, Mitch and me

Mitch Albom (pictured) was born in 1958. He’s a man of many talents, but he’s best known as an author with book sales of over 26M [1, 2]. His breakthrough book, tuesdays with Maurie: an old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson [3] dates from 1997. It’d passed me by – until recently when my darling sister Sue suggested I read it. So I did. It tackles some profound life issues [4], though cursorily and not head-on. But it’s sold 11M copies, so readers have spoken. Here are three edited excerpts:

The culture we have doesn’t make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. You have to be strong enough to say that if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. But most people can’t do it.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, to your community around you, and to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over: Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.