MY AFTERNOONS WITH MARGUERITTE

One does not choose whom to love; the heart is without doors and to a certain extent always bleeding, pulsating, uncontrollable with a “mind” and an emotional language unique unto itself.

“My Afternoons with Margueritte”  is an enchanting, compelling tale of two disparate souls, lonely, meeting on a park bench in a small French village. “Germain” depicted by a massively inflated, rotund Gerard Depardieu; a day laborer and vegetable producer at the Farmer’s Market level; his coarse and unloving mother has berated and resented him since his illegitimate birth. He encounters “Margueritte” intelligently and angelically played by 95 year old Gisele Casadesus.

Their serendipitous pairing results in a sharing of ideas, words;  her passion is literature and she reads aloud to Germain at first passages, then gradually the entirety of the gripping novels of Albert Camus; she is alluring, irresistible, fragile, feminine, beautiful. Theirs is a genuine intimacy that intensifies as he gains confidence and she is losing her most precious commodity, sight.  Here are two, maybe not extraordinary, but far from ordinary individuals who develop a bond of friendship and love that transcends age, life’s station, education; a match destined to be refined, polished and protected; platinum, in a world of bronze.

Directed by Jean Becker; written by Becker and Jean-Loup Dabadle “My Afternoons with Margueritte” is a film that grasps and portrays the true luxuries in life: reading, sharing, sitting in the park, lubricating the rusty hinges of the intellect, counting and naming the pigeons; no longer solitary; now united, copasetic souls.

Benjamin Disraeli said :“The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him, his own”. Margueritte was the erstwhile scholar, the flame igniting Germain’s enlightenment; culminating in the whole being much vaster than the sum of its parts.

FOUR STARS!!!!

For Now……….Peneflix