My Afternoons with Margueritte

Germain is in his fifties and treated by the whole town as a bit simple. He can barely read, he is at war with his mother, and he is the butt of his friends' jokes at the café. Counting pigeons in the park one day, a woman of ninety-five sits down beside him: Margueritte. She starts reading to him, Camus first and then others. For the first time in his life Germain gets inside a text. The film is not interested in reading but in someone not being treated as stupid for once. Learning to read is not staged as a triumph; the real change is the sentence he uses about himself. Margueritte's eyes are failing too, and the direction of the relationship reverses by the end. Jean Becker directed and co-wrote with Jean-Loup Dabadie, from Marie-Sabine Roger's novel of the same name. Gerard Depardieu plays Germain. Gisele Casadesus, who plays Margueritte, was born in 1914 and was ninety-six during filming, with a first screen credit going back to 1934. It opened on 5 September 2010. Who it is for: anyone who likes warm French provincial films and friendship across generations. Who it is not for: anyone who avoids sentiment. The film states its message plainly, the townspeople are drawn crudely, and the resolution is too tidy.