Depardieu plays Germain, a lovable loser. He lives in a trailer in his mother’s garden. He has friends in the village, but they all laugh at him and think he is stupid. Then he meets Margueritte, an intelligent, highly literate woman in her 90s, and she reads to him, and thus unlocks the door to knowledge, and enlightenment, and self-respect, and respect from others, and all those other clichés that we get from this ‘gosh, isn’t reading good?’ kind of film.
But, despite it winning no prizes for originality, My Afternoons with Margueritte is actually very sweet and touching. The relationships between Germain and the women in his life - his scary mother who has never shown him any love, his ridiculously pretty, young, vivacious girlfriend (sorry to be shallow but, really? French women don’t like dungarees, do they?), and of course Margueritte - are all very sensitively and movingly conveyed.
This is very much Sunday afternoon cinema. Themes of ageing, of mother/son relationships, of different kinds of love, are covered at a very gentle pace, but it never fails to be charming. Oh, apart from at the very end where an awful saccharine poem is read over the end credits. I would advise you to leave before that bit, as the sugar content may send you over the edge. You’ll get horribly hyperactive on the way home.
[Original review here]
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