Jean Becker is unquestionably a poet of rural France as time after time, film after film, he celebrates the hinterland in much the same way as Marcel Pagnol used to do. Above all - again like Pagnol - his characters have warmth, charm, heart - and those are only the heavies. This time around he has cast Gerard Depardiu as an illeterate oak though lovable with it. Although he has his share of friends in the rural community he is often the butt of their jokes but given the gorgeous much younger girlfriend he has acquired the laugh is surely on them. One day sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons he stumbles on a charming elderly lady whose idea of light reading is Camus' The Plague. They strike up a friendship and are soon meeting daily and Depardieu is absorbing culture by osmosis. That's pretty much it but it is done superbly not least by Giselle Casadesus, who really was born in 1914 or three years before Danielle Darrieux who is also still working. British reviewers seem to think Casadesus is a newcomer yet she has been working for years not least in Becker's Les Enfants du Marais and Valerie Lemercier's Palais Royal. This is a wonderful film that I can't recommend highly enough.
Review of My Afternoons with Margueritte
