La tête en friche

La tête en friche is a beautiful little French film based on the book by Marie-Sabine Roger and adapted for the screen by Jean-Loup Dabadie and director Jean Becker. A tale of an unexpected life change that occurs when an incidental meeting on a park bench brings together an illiterate lonely man with an elderly woman whose best friends are her books in the isolation of old age, this is truly a story of transformation and a definition of pure love.

Germain Chazes (Gérard Depardieu) grew up in an unwanted home, the brunt of teachers and classmates because they considered him illiterate, and now he is forced to lead a hand to mouth existence in a house trailer close to his now elderly, crass, alcoholic mother who still loathes him. He supports himself with odd jobs and by selling the vegetables he grows in his small garden. One day he visits his lunch spot - a park bench where he has named the 19 pigeons as his only real friends - and there he meets a very properly dressed elderly woman named Margueritte (two t 's because her father didn't know how to spell!) played by Gisèle Casadesus, who spends her days reading Camus, Proust, and other French classics aloud. They bond - Germain shares his pigeons' names and Margueritte introduces him in the most gentle manner to the joy of reading. Every day thereafter the two meet and Margueritte reads to Germain to the extent that Germain decides to learn to read despite his advanced years. Margueritte's influence changes Germain's outlook and response to the world and the ending, while sad on one level, is uplifting.

Both Depardieu and Casadesus are remarkable in their roles, never becoming caricatures but blossoming into completely warm and memorable people. The French cast is exceptional and the musical score and cinematography are as beautiful as the story they reveal.

Grady Harp

One of the greatest performance of French actor Gerard Depardieu lately. After the more somber and underground art film Mammuth, were you recognize somewhat the frees spirited Depardieu of the cult movie "Les Valseuses" (1974), here comes an unexpected tender and touching story of an adult that can barely read and an elderly lady from a retirement home. A love story begins, her love of words and books drives his desire to finally learn to "travel with words" and their love for each other blossoms. The director is know for his love of the human kind, undeserved as it may be, he glorifies the good one can do to another human being. It is a refreshing film, not a dark satire of society, but a joyful, hopeful, moving story with a true happy end. Don't miss it !

A film like Jean Becker's My Afternoons with Margueritte spoils me with a lyricism found not just in a small French provincial town filled with eccentric, lovable characters but also in sentiment propelled by exquisite words found in Camus and Romain Gary. And an odd couple who find love that is sometimes not named.

In perhaps a nod to Harold and Maude, Germain (Gerard Depardieu), a 50 year old non reader, meets in the park with 90 year old Margueritte (Gisele Casadesus), who initially reads to him from Camus' The Plague. As she awakens his interest in reading, his life changes, not the least of which is finding a loving mother figure for the abusive real one. Or maybe discovering Leonard Cohen's Suzanne.

So much more is layered in this romantic story: a Cheers-like café where love and disrespect, the two poles of sentiment in the film, play out in a way that exalts the affection even in the hardest of relationships; a traditional love affair for Germain with the younger Francine (Maurane) that may turn around the story's primary January-May motif but parallels it in the deeply loving relationship that seeks to perpetuate itself.

So much of My Afternoons is about renewal and rebirth, and so little is about death that the formula for too old to be young no longer applies. Nor does my expectation to be grossed out by Depardieu's enormous girth, a sad counterpoint to his dashing younger days. But wait, his weight is perfect for the role, his lines read with such understated beauty as to shout, "Where have you been, Gerard?" The bear-like man revealing a daisy-like affect is poetically perfect for the story.

If you expect the film to follow a formula, you will be correct, except maybe for the ending which confirms the motif of unnamed love conquering all. Actually, the film makes you cry for more of the odd-couple romantic formula.

As for the transforming power of books, Abe Lincoln had a witty take on the subject: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read." Change that to "woman" and you have My Afternoons with Margueritte.

A sweet trifle of a film, taken to a deeper and richer level by two outstanding performances.

Gerard Depardieu, in what must be his 6,000th film still feels fresh and alive as the overweight, under educated and well meaning laborer who can hardly read, and who strikes up a chance friendship with the 94 year old Margueritte, played with amazing delicacy and life force by the wonderful Gisele Casadesus, who was an astounding 95 herself when this was made. Oh that we all should live so long with such grace.

Marguritte begins reading to the quasi-literate Germain, who finds his interest in reading sparked, and with it an expanded sense of self. He even finds himself falling in love (in a chaste almost childlike way) with the still beautiful Margueritte.

Simplistic, sure, sentimental, undoubtedly. But much like Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman in 'Driving Miss Daisy' these two actors give performances that make you want to forgive anything that might otherwise feel trite or too on the nose (e.g. the very literal flashbacks to Germain's childhood).

Not quite a great film, but a charming, sweet, life-affirming and very human one.

I thought that Becker's "Dialogue avec mon jardinier" was an excellent film; but watching "La tête en friche", I think this is his master work.

Depardieu is "the" actor in the current French movie scene and I can't imagine anyone other in the role of Germain Chazes. But the film lives by the art of both protagonists: Gisèle Casadesus and Gérard Depardieu. It is hard to imagine a greater contrast than the well educated lady on the one hand and the proletarian worker who had the worst start in life one can imagine, on the other hand.

It is a very old subject which was already treated in 1668 by the novel of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen "Simplicius Simplicissimus" where a very simple person, a shepherd, by education and learning makes career as an army officer. Nothing other is demonstrated in this movie: A simple boy (shown in the flash backs) who never had a chance to become an educated person, gets the chance to learn due to the caring of an old lady and becomes all of a sudden a different person.

He notices the the problems of his surrounding and even understands his mother in the end - who always treated him mean during her lifetime.

This is a very moving film which gives hope that people and persons can be changed in their behavior by much love and understanding of their surroundings.

An excellent performance of Gisèle Casadesus (at the age of 96 years!) and Gérard Depardieu.

I voted 10 of 10 points.