Review: MAIGRET

Post-war Paris. A beautiful young woman covers herself as a shop assistant fits her with a satin ball gown. Her timidity is painful and seems a creation of trauma. That night she appears at the occasion but when spied by one of the ladies of the crowd she is ejected with a discrete savagery. The lady's companion joins the motion and after a nasty tussle he pushes money into the woman's hand. Extortion? Something. Something enough to leave her flat on her face by the Seine with multiple stab wounds and a forfeited hire bond. Detective Maigret doesn't know where to start with this Jeanne D'oe.

Whodunnits are nothing - Colonel Mustard in the library with the caltrop - why dunnits are intriguing. Maigret, the jovian homicide chief of Georges Simenon's lifetime of novels, takes his burdened time to see the picture he needs before he moves. The victim's details appear with glacial frequency but the old cop's wiliness finds a means of insight in befriending a young woman like the victim: country-bred in Paris for a more interesting life. She is of more help than the forensic report as she gets him closer to the wherefore.

You won't have a great deal of trouble guessing the who but that is not the point. If the motive also seems underwhelming it would be best to recall that it carried more shock when the story was fresh. However, this movie is about more than that. The themes of class and privilege weigh heavily and are maintained solidly (even venturing into self reflection with scenes on a movie set). Verite techniques offset the lint-free perfection of the period costumes and sexy low angles of beautiful vintage cars; more than once we follow action with a handheld camera and many shots with entrances make good use of available light. It's subtle world building and stronger for it.

At its earth's core is the figure of Maigret played with painstaking restraint by monument vivant, Gerard Depardieu. Depardieu has carried himself into this gravitational anchor status for most of his career but now, when he might go from scene to scene chewing a little mise en scene, he studies his role even more closely. When he sits on the edge of his bed after his doctor has warned him off tobacco he gazes into the halflight. We know without a syllable that he is thinking of his mortality. If he leaves a question or observation unresponded, we know he has drawn a conclusion beyond which all utterance is gratuitous. If he had ever been in danger of relaxing into the go to French bear when that was needed he cast the mantle off decades before and is happy to pursue his craft. There is no thunder to Maigret. There isn't even the kind of impossible erudition that such a celebrated sleuth usually gets. While he does offer a genuinely clever Belgian joke he shrugs as he misses literary references by others.

The central relationship with the blow-in woman from the land has a noirish candour to it and Jade Labeste as Betty brings us the closest to Maigret's vulnerability. The campaign of trust building between the two becomes genuinely touching. That needs to happen as when she, with consent, agrees to serve as a kind of bait for the investigation that bond needs to expose the danger for its sordidness. A late scene showing the victim as an extra in a film plays with focus as Maigret and a cinema audience watch. Only he is seeing the power of the image. The rest if for us.

This slowburn tale is one of the better I've seen for many a moon. The pathos at its heart and the grief in its procedure build something both tidy and affecting. At a hair under ninety minutes you will leave it thinking you've seen something that should have taken longer. It's trick you won't mind falling for.