“Maigret” (M) ***

WHEN I settled down to watch what French writer/director Patrice Leconte has confected with Georges Simenon’s tale of his good friend Jules Maigret as developed into a screenplay by Jérôme Tonnerre, it took but a few minutes to realise that I was in for a bit of a treat. 

Not outstanding cinema; just a no-nonsense movie that avoided bells and whistles, told it like it was and showcased Gerard Depardieu in the title role.

Plot? It’s 1953, an attractive young woman (Simenon called his story “Maigret et La Jeune Fille”) clad in an expensive-looking ball gown now covered in blood. She’s dead. No name. Find who she is, how she came to be found and where. And who dunnit. A stolid, well-built movie. I liked it.

Simple ingredients, filmed sometimes in monochrome, other times in colour, populated by characters, some helpful, others determined to obfuscate.

And towering over the whole thing, a massive man mourning the recent death of his daughter, driven by a professional urge to discover whodunit in the best tradition of the genre.

Now 73, with 248 titles in his filmography, Depardieu moves like an overweight behemoth. An uncharitable observer might wonder, did he get the role as a farewell gesture after a stellar movie career that began when he was 19? I met him briefly at the Sydney Film Festival long ago. Some moments escape one’s cognitive impairment.

At Palace Electric