Le promeneur du Champ de Mars

This is a fascinating little film about the last few months in the life of Francois Mitterrand (Michel Bouquet), president of France 1981-95, and his relationship with a young man, Antoine Moreau (Jalil Lespert), who has been commissioned to write his life story.

Bouquet is, quite simply, phenomenal as Mitterrand; his physical resemblance is uncanny and his mannerisms and speech are spot-on. It is a delight to see the way he takes you into the heart and soul of a quite controversial figure in post-War French politics; Bouquet portrays the way that Mitterrand seemed to genuinely retain his socialist beliefs, right up until the 1990s. He visits a closed mine, the scene of a tragedy many years before which cost the lives of forty miners, to make a moving and rousing speech on the plight of French workers and the accomplishments of the socialist party in France (minimum pay, paid holidays, shorter hours, etc.). There is fine language and rhetoric but also genuine feeling, delivered in an awesome performance by Bouquet.

Mitterrand had a great rivalry with Charles de Gaulle, and this is given a lot of time in the film. Also, Lespert is keen to delve into the murky past of Mitterrand during his service in Vichy under Petain; you get the feeling there's a lot more to find out here, something Lespert discovers in his secret trip to the infamous spa town.

It seems pointless, the little sideline of Lespert's personal life, time that could be better spent on Mitterrand's personal life, which is totally absent from this film. I'd like to have seen a lot of archive film: Mitterrand and Kohl meeting at Verdun, for instance.

Mitterrand reflects on modern politics and the great advances made by modern France: for example, the modern transport system (we see Mitterrand travelling by the modern TGV train, the envy of the world).

This is a fascinating film for any Francophile. It is a grey landscape - particularly Mitterrand's last visit to his home town and the beach nearby - but that is politics. Highly recommended.

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.

Political character study from France by Robert Guediguian

With this film from 2005 (which was also shown in competition at the Berlinale in the same year), the French director Robert Guediguian creates an extraordinary memorial to the late President Francois Mitterrand (1916-1996). In the original the film is called "Le Promeneur du Champ de Mars", roughly: The Stroller from the Field of Mars. The Field of Mars is the park (and former military parade ground) at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where some scenes in the film were filmed.

Mitterrand is in the final weeks of his term as President of France (1981-1995). At that time, the term of office of a French president, who could be re-elected once, was seven years. Only with the re-election of his successor Jacques Chirac in 2002 was the term of office shortened to five years. In the midst of the dissolution in the Elysee Palace, Mitterrand has conversations with a young journalist named Antoine Moreau (played by Jalil Lespert), who expects these encounters to give him a major career boost. The president has completely different goals. He is concerned with leaving the public with an image that he has shaped himself, which he tries to achieve with the help of an easily influenced and naive young media representative. Moreau does not notice how he is being manipulated more and more by the cunning ruler Mitterrand. There is a lot to be dealt with in the political life of the President, who, among other things, knows how to cleverly and cunningly keep his shady role during the Vichy regime and his second family with his daughter Mazarine Pingeot (now a well-known writer and journalist in France) secret from the public.

It's a pleasure to watch this cat-and-mouse game between a political fox par excellence and his hopelessly inferior sparring partner. And all for a benevolent souvenir in the history books! Michel Bouquet, born in 1925, plays this role brilliantly and quite rightly received the French film award "Cesar" for best leading actor in 2006. Bouquet had already had some notable appearances over the course of his long career. In 1959 he played alongside the German-speaking world stars Romy Schneider and Curd Jürgens in "Katja, die ungekrönte Kaiserin" by Robert Siodmak, and was one of the victims in the Francois Truffaut classic "La mariee etait en noir" (1968) with Jeanne Moreau the title role and played the husband in "La femme infidele" (1969) by Claude Chabrol.

This film is a gem! No action, lots of dialogue! And yes, it is an advantage if you know something about French history over the last decades. But if that's not the case, you can watch a political predator at work. Politicians of the caliber of Francois Mitterrand no longer exist today. It's all the more fun to immerse yourself in a time that wasn't that long ago, but still seems far away.

This risk is worth it. Recommended!

I saw this movie yesterday, with somebody who have neither live in this country during Mitterand's presidency, nor had an interest with our narrow views on our own politics. And I was surprised,thinking I would show her part of the history of one of the most important guy in our recent history (the French one), to see that, actually, it's not about this president at all. Of course, there's some names mentioned, some events, but the main character is called "Mr President" and nothing else, and the movie focuses on "off times" of the president, moments of privacy shared with a journalist who is supposed to write a book about him. This is the story of an old man who, facing his death, tries to find peace and struggle to do what he have to face. The last two month of his presidency, when, literally eaten by his disease, he slowly becomes an impotent. The wish of being in the memory of his country ("Tell them than I'm not the Evil", he says to Antoine, the young idealistic journalist). His childish behavior (when he forces his bodyguards to stays on the beach and talk about poetry while the rain starts to fall, or when he confesses that he'd like to drive a Renault down the fifth avenue with Julia Roberts on his side...). And, most of all, his fight against his own past. About this, the best moment in this movie is when he says that some Jewish group wants "France to bow and begs for pardon like Willy Brandt. But that was not France !" After all, this is a story of a man who has such a past, such a (hi)story, that he becomes his own country, with all its contradictions, dark sides, denial, but also hopes, and definitely a sharp sense of humor... Although we could say that it's about time that this country turns the page and faces its history (what Mitterand never did), we can't say, here in France, that he will be forgotten. Never a president has be his country such as he did.

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.