Maybe it’s a surprise that Gérard Depardieu has not before now taken on the one fictional character of comparable French iconic status to himself: Georges Simenon’s Parisian police commissaire Maigret. Well, it’s now Depardieu’s turn to put on the detective’s trademark overcoat, hat, pipe, and wintry half-smile of detached amusement at human nature and the criminal mind.
This film, directed and co-written by Patrice Leconte, is based on the 1954 novel Maigret and the Dead Girl; it feels like a feature-length Sunday-night TV drama, and at 74 Depardieu is surely a couple of decades older than the usual Maigret. He is also a rather stately and well-nourished figure – when his doctor asks him if he feels tired in the medical checkup scene at the beginning of this film, Maigret actually answers: “Sometimes … when running for a bus.” Running for a bus? Any film that actually had a scene of Depardieu running for a bus would deserve every special effects award going: in fact, Depardieu contrives to take a good many of his scenes sitting down.
But Depardieu brings his natural charisma and watchful presence to the role, and he can bring off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste at the transparently guilty people he comes across. The discovery of a horribly stabbed dead young woman in an expensive ballgown in a Paris street brings out Maigret’s pity and fatherly concern for what appears to have been a naive country girl who was in over her head in some creepy sexual menage. He recruits another transient to impersonate the girl so that he can get inside her mind, and this is to culminate in an ingeniously Shakespearean method for trapping the culprit. A little gamey, this movie, like the “pressed duck” that Maigret agrees to eat in one scene – but reasonably tasty.
• Maigret is released on 1 September in UK and Irish cinemas, and is available to stream on Stan and Binge in Australia.
