Director: Patrice Leconte
Year: 2022
Country: France
Rating: 7.5
Thankfully, the filmmakers didn't turn Maigret
into an action hero as they have with Holmes and Poirot - and I am hoping
Miss Marple someday - but with Gérard Depardieu and his enormous girth
playing the character that would have been impossible. When he walks up a
few flights of stairs, you worry that he will have a heart attack. It seems
like they would need a crane to get him out of his chair. He walks so slowly
in the deserted Parisian streets that it feels like forever. But nevertheless,
he plays a wonderful Maigret. Perhaps the best since Jean Gabin in the 1950s.
Terse, understanding, humane, emotions kept to a minimum, his face a blank
wall with his bulbous broken nose, he crawls inch by inch towards a resolution
of a murder. Based on a 1954 novel by Simenon, titled Maigret and the Dead
Girl. Every time I watch one of these Maigret films, I want to go on a reading
binge of his books. Fortunately, there were a lot of them.
Moody and melancholic, much of it shot in
dim light or overcast skies, loneliness sears its way through the film like
a dull knife. Paris can be a lonely place and in small scenes you can feel
it. A man drinking by himself in a bar, an old man still thinking about the
woman that went missing during the war, the dead daughter of Maigret that
is left unspoken about but is a shadow on his heart in the film. When a young
woman is found murdered with five stab wounds on the street, she in some
way reminds him of his daughter as does another young wayward woman he comes
across. He needs to solve one and save the other. He becomes obsessed with
the case and the two girls. Over the film they almost merge into one in his
mind - both with moles on the side of their neck and no one to care for them.
Except Maigret.
He is an older Maigret, nearing retirement,
not feeling well, unable to taste food, feel enthusiasm, brooding, sensing
his mortality. He is about to go home for the night to his wife but he gets
a last minute call. A woman has been found dead. He puts off going home.
To see the body. Only says, "close her eyes". And the police procedural grind
begins. No identification. No one knows her. No one knows who her friends
were. Came to Paris from the provinces to make it big and only found sadness,
loneliness and death. Maigret keeps digging. It is an engrossing case - never
exciting mind you - just atmospheric and heavy as a weight is on you. Directed
by Patrice Leconte. It would be nice if this turned into a series.
