Maigret review – Gérard Depardieu is a charismatic version of Simenon’s detective – The Guardian
Maybe it’s a shock that Gérard Depardieu has not prior to now taken on the one fictional character of comparable French iconic standing to himself: Georges Simenon’s Parisian police commissaire Maigret. Effectively, it’s now Depardieu’s flip to placed on the detective’s trademark overcoat, hat, pipe, and wintry half-smile of indifferent amusement at human nature and the legal thoughts.
This movie, directed and co-written by Patrice Leconte, is predicated on the 1954 novel Maigret and the Lifeless Woman; it seems like a feature-length Sunday-night TV drama, and at 74 Depardieu is unquestionably a few many years older than the same old Maigret. He’s additionally a somewhat stately and well-nourished determine – when his physician asks him if he feels drained within the medical checkup scene initially of this movie, Maigret really solutions: “Typically … when operating for a bus.” Operating for a bus? Any movie that really had a scene of Depardieu operating for a bus would deserve each particular results award going: in actual fact, Depardieu contrives to take a very good lots of his scenes sitting down.
However Depardieu brings his pure charisma and watchful presence to the position, and he can carry off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste on the transparently responsible folks he comes throughout. The invention of a horribly stabbed lifeless younger lady in an costly ballgown in a Paris avenue brings out Maigret’s pity and fatherly concern for what seems to have been a naive nation lady who was in over her head in some creepy sexual menage. He recruits one other transient to impersonate the lady in order that he can get inside her thoughts, and that is to culminate in an ingeniously Shakespearean technique for trapping the wrongdoer. A little bit gamey, this film, just like the “pressed duck” that Maigret agrees to eat in a single scene – however fairly tasty.
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