Le promeneur du Champ de Mars

No doubts about it, Michel Bouquet as the late French President, Francois Mitterand, had an excellent performance. It reminds me Bruno Ganz's interpretation of A. Hitler in "Der Untergang" (The Downfall). But, what would have been the movie without him? That is what has disturbed me from the beginning. Antoine Moreau was, to my eyes, everything else but convincing in his role. this could be interpreted as a weakness of the film, as everything looks to have been focused on one and only one character, the old dying Mitterand who is preparing his farewell as president. A little bit of french/European history knowledge might be helpful, but nevertheless, this film is to recommend.

Mister president is sitting in an empty railway carriage (second class) with his little entourage. The train is cruising leisurely through a soggy, foggy, wintry landscape. „What is the color of France?" he asks. As always, he gives the answer himself: „It's gray. France has many shades of gray. Gray is not so bad after all."

This movie is gray and slightly spooky throughout, but that really isn't so bad after all. Michel Bouquet delivers a totally stunning performance as an old, dying sly fox who is very lonely and uses – or abuses – a young writer as a companion with the promise to give him material for memoirs. They go crypt- and cemeterywatching together (preparations have to be made), go for walks on the beach and in the park, and at one time the young, self righteous chap comes in handy because the old gentleman can't make it out of the bathtub alone anymore.

The old man has been surrounded by yes-men too long, he is almost overwhelmed by the sense of his own importance. He is out of touch and he senses that it is difficult to make a clean exit. But, hey, he still wants to have some fun. It consists mainly of manipulating other people, letting them feel his power in a subtle, cultivated way - but, well, that's just too bad. You have to enjoy yourself as long as you can.

I consider this movie mainly a comedy, I really don't care if there are any similarities with people that once existed. If a former French president looked like Michel Bouquet, who makes any film he is in watchable, then I can't help it. The set design deserves special mention, it is usually luxurious and stylish in a presidential way but a little shopworn. And it always seems to be cold in this movie. The atmosphere reminded me of Hal Ashby's Being There.

Anybody who likes gray movies should watch this, others had better stay away.

This is not your usual biopic. It is more of a rumination on those big abstract topics the French love so much: what is a legacy? Where is French glory to be found? Does France even have any resonance or sense any more in the face of globalisation/EU? The meanings of Frenchness are clearly articulated here by Guediguian's camera which lovingly records fields of hay, Chartres cathedral, and the lined faces of the 'travailleurs': it is here that the documentary impulse of the film lies, rather than in its tracing of Mitterrand's past, and here that we can see the links to Guediguian's more usual style and themes of filming with their socio-political investment in "ordinary" people. What seems to fascinate the film is less the issue of whether Mitterrand joined the Resistance in 42 or 43 (we never learn the "true" answer) but what happens to a man when he is in power. Mitterrand is closed in by grey doors in the beautiful Elysee palace which becomes a living prison of coldness (interesting the moment where he praises the colour grey). We never get a sense of the man having a family, even though he talks lovingly of a daughter: we see him constantly surrounded by men in black, with him out of a sense of professional duty rather than because they care for him. Power cuts you off from those you are meant to serve...Mitterrand's closest relationship is to the petrified former rulers of France. A chilling portrait of what happens when a man turns himself into an icon. And a movingly brilliant performance from Bouquet, who perfectly captures the horror of the body that slowly falls apart...The film ends on a note of hope for the future, with the birth of a child and the forming of a new relationship: but it is noticeable that it is in the private sphere that Guediguian places hope for the future: the hope of a committed leftist project has perhaps died along with Mitterrand.

A dying president dictates his memoirs to a young journalist: this may not sound like a very exciting recipe for a film. But in fact, 'The Last Mitterand' is an intriguing movie. In part this stems from the fact that the eponymous French leader was an intriguing person in real life - a literate egoist with a heroic but compromised past, who believed himself to be the last great president of France and who completed his term of office while suffering (without any public announcement) from the terminal stages of cancer. But it also comes from the judicious blend of the political and the personal found in this film. In the title role, I'm not sure Michel Bouqet looks much like Mitterand - but one can believe utterly in his portrait. And while Mitterand was certainly a flawed politician, when contrasted to the leaders of our own celebrity driven age (Mitterand has mistresses who never made the press; current French president Sarkozy uses his sexy young wife - and former mistress - as a PR tool), his claim to at least relative greatness no longer seems risible.

A leading politician for almost 50 years, from the dark days of the Vichy, through the De Gaulle era into the 1990s, Mitterand finally grasped the crown of the French presidency only to find that he had prostrate cancer with a short time to live. His father had succumbed in 2 years to the same disease.

Mitterand struggled on for the whole fourteen years of his two terms as President but in the twilight months of office he makes a strange invitation to young journalist Georges-Marc Benamou, a Jew, to write his memoirs. Benamou is fascinated by the contrasts. Mitterand came from the right, in the 1930s he was a member of a fascist group that protested about immigrants. Benamou wants to find out about Mitterand's murky war years when the President worked for Petain's collaborationist Vichy regime. He finds out that no-one in France, least of all the President, wants to look at this time too closely.

Mitterand still holds a fascination for France. The man who betrayed the right to become a committed socialist, made the left wing electable and then presided over France almost like Louis the XIVth. His first couple of years were marked by radical reform, crisis, retrenchment then a long period of stagnation under cohabitation with a right wing government. But his period in office reminds people of a "temps perdu" of certainty before globalization and it maybe this reason why the cinema was nearly full on a cold Tuesday afternoon.

The film tells us less than we know, certain controversial parts of Benamou's book, such as the last New Year supper where Mitterand gobbles down Ortolan, are left out although the President's half brother, the actor Roger Hanin, recently confirmed the veracity of these events. Michel Bouquet portrayal of the declining days of Mitterand is excellent. It is almost painful to watch and the other characters are superb.