VFew good things have been heard of Gérard Depardieu in recent years. In 2012, he fell off a scooter while drunk in Paris; it was his eighteenth motorcycle accident up to that point, several of them intoxicated and one involving a physical attack on the other party involved in the accident. A year later he became a Russian citizen with an ukase from Vladimir Putin; He has a residence in the small town of Saransk and an apartment in Grozny, a gift from Chechen dictator Kadyrov. In August 2018, a young actress reported him for rape; In 2020, a preliminary investigation began, which Depardieu sued in vain for. The investigation is ongoing.
At the same time, Gérard Depardieu has rarely been better as an actor than he has been in recent times. In the Balzac film adaptation “Lost Illusions” he embodies, growling and waving, an illiterate publisher, in the tragic comedy “The Taste of Small Things” a star chef in search of meaning, in the men’s drama “Des hommes” a veteran of the Algerian war. And each time he gives the characters he plays a fragile dignity that one would hardly have expected from his bulky stature. You don’t know what should surprise you more: the consistent crash course he follows in his private life, or the sovereign ability of a man who has been in the front row of French cinema for fifty years. It would certainly be cynical to say that one thing leads to the other. But the idea cannot be completely dismissed either.
In the beginning of Patrice Leconte’s film “Maigret” one only sees fragments of Depardieu: an arm with a blood pressure cuff hanging from it, part of the upper body, a tired face. Maigret sits at the doctor’s with heart problems: shortness of breath when climbing stairs, insomnia at night. The doctor asks him how his appetite is. “I feed myself.” – “But the joy of it is gone?” – “Yes.” – “Not only because of that?” Again the inspector agrees. The doctor then explains to him that he must make “an enormous sacrifice”: Maigret should stop smoking his pipe.
The miniaturization of his hero as a patient is the one trick that Leconte uses to set the story in motion. The other is the anticipation of the crime plot: a young woman with shy gestures and a sad look borrows an expensive silk dress in a boutique. She drives to a private dinner party, where she causes a stir. A young man in tails pushes her into the stairwell, followed by a cut, and shortly thereafter the woman lies on the street in her blood-soaked dress. Only now does Maigret come into play, but even after this short prelude it is clear that he has more in common with the dead than his job. Her sadness and his melancholy belong together.
It’s about loneliness, youth and old age
“Maigret and the Young Dead” was published in 1954. It is the forty-fifth of Georges Simenon’s seventy-five Maigret novels and, like almost all Maigret novels, it has been filmed several times. The fact that Patrice Leconte adapted it again is due to a special feature of the original, which is already expressed in the title. This book is about youth and old age, and it’s about loneliness – the same loneliness that surrounded the hero in Leconte’s first film adaptation of Simenon, The Betrothal of Monsieur Hire. That was in 1989. So far, Monsieur Hire was Leconte’s best film. Now it is Maigret.