a mirror portrait of the commissioner and Depardieu

CANAL+ CINEMA – MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21 AT 9:00 P.M. – FILM

The subject of numerous film adaptations and multi-broadcast television, it is with a form of mistrust for deja-vu that we enter Patrice Leconte’s latest film, which marks his first collaboration with Gérard Depardieu. Happy news: the minimal incarnation of the star, whose slightest movement can barely lift his own cast, a far cry from the brisk and brutal Mangin of Police (Maurice Pialat, 1985), proves to be consistent with the Maigret method which consists in doing nothing but observing, sucking up life all around and inflating oneself like a sponge.

The Russians have often said that Maigret was a “constructive” character. No doubt it is necessary to understand a hero capable of developing plans to defuse the most delicate situations. Maigret by Depardieu plays more deconstruction. He is tired, feeling vague, has no appetite for veal blanquette or sardines in oil and is breathing badly. A stethoscope on his chest, he understands that he must quit smoking. On the verge of breaking his pipe? Not quite anyway.

Chiseled classicism

A sad affair will soon bring him out of his pensive torpor: a young girl has died in a square in Paris. Lying in a Maggy Rouff haute couture evening dress that hides Prisunic underwear, this anonymous person with a porcelain face and a stabbed bust seems to belong to no world. This lack of traces awakens the old cop’s taste for difficult investigations.

This loose adaptation of Simenon’s detective novel Maigret and the dead girl (1954) is called Maigret. Sober or arrogant, the choice of surname reveals in any case Leconte’s ambition to paint a definitive portrait of the commissioner, picking up his sense of investigation, but also his intimate and empathetic part, as a quiet husband and father marked by loss. of his daughter. Rid of his pipe, his Maigret feels all naked ». Can then emerge another portrait, that of the aging actor who comes to marry the first in a sweet communion (directing the testamentary film of Depardieu seems to be the obsession of filmmakers, all generations combined).

With a chiseled classicism – the lustrous post-war reconstruction favors detail over the total look as a backdrop – the film tightens the plot of the novel around the desire for emancipation of young provincials, convinced that they owe their salvation only to men, to sex and to their photogeny. Beneath its airs of a paternalistic film, this Maigret has the great merit of giving particular attention to the victims and the youth: Betty (Jade Labeste), fresh as a roach, slips into the skin of the dead to help the investigation. And this game of mirrors in which the film elegantly weaves gives the ghosts of these poor departed their fugitive silhouette.