Once again, I have been looking at the business of turning a written story into a filmed story, in this case the Maigret story from 1954 at reference 1, turned into the 2022 film at references 2 and 3, a film starring Gérard Depardieu. A story about tracking down the killer of a young girl found late one night in a street in Paris: rue de Vintimille, just below Monmartre. Simenon, as usual, is careful about his Parisian street names. Sometimes confused by the post-war renaming of streets after war heroes of one sort or another.
In all of which, it took me a while to cotton onto the change of the name of the film to ‘Maigret’, which should have warned me that the adaptation was going to be a very loose one.
The story follows the usual Maigret lines, steadily building up her picture of the victim and her life, a process (left in the figure above) which, more or less randomly, provides the clues which unlock the murder (right). Told very much from Maigret’s point of view and while I have not checked, I don’t suppose there are many pages among the 150 or so from which he is missing.
This against the familiar background of Maigret’s home and Maigret’s office. A twist which provides a bit of novelty is the Lognon chase in parallel to the Maigret chase, Lognon being a rather odd chap – nicknamed by all ‘Malgracieux’ – a very good detective but not HQ material and who appears in a number of the Maigret stories. However, right at the end, after a good run, Lognon makes the wrong call and heads off to Brussels. Maigret is the better reader of people!
While the film, while using some of the story, leaves most of it out, filling in with material drawn from other stories – or just invented. Quite a lot of shots of Maigret/Depardieu just pondering.
Mainly filmed in low light using a very muted colour palette, only livened up by the clothes, the food and the table dressing at the two parties, the two pivots on which the film hangs, perhaps from a narrative theory point of view replacing the nine chapters of the story. Two dollops of more or less unnecessary sex: first some improbable nudity around dressing in the dress hire shop; and, second the dodgy sex parties organised by the fiancé of girl 2. Parties which, to be fair, we are told about rather than shown. Sex parties which eventually lead to an accidental death on the stairs – rather than the more old-fashioned robbery gone wrong in the story.
The victim’s father, a career conman with a taste for the good life, the unthinking trigger, as it were, for the chain of events that leads to her death, is missing.
The Lognon angle, important in the story, is missing.
While girl 3 is more or less invented, inter alia a peg on which to hang Maigret’s nostalgia and regret for his long-lost daughter, present in the oeuvre as a whole, but absent from this story. Ditto Maigret’s medical affairs. And he never gives up the pipe; puffer to the end.
There are lots of cuts in the film, lots of short takes, this reflecting the fact that one can make a point visually far faster than one can make the same point in words. Which is all very well, but if there is too much of it one overloads and glazes over. The words run at a more sustainable speed.
But while the narrative of the investigation is rather lost, we do have some continuity with Maigret’s pipe, his home and his office. Continuity which includes various bits and pieces which Maigret buffs will notice but which others may well miss.
Not bad, but all a bit mannered. All too much of a vehicle for Depardieu, who is a bit too old and fat for the role. I prefer the late Gambon.
Oddments
Abebooks might be owned by Amazon but it is clearly not part of the free delivery deal that comes with Prime. See the opening snap.
The film runs to around 90 minutes. Compared with both Davies (1960-63) and Gambon (1992-93) episodes on TV at around 50 minutes. And Atkinson (2016-7) at around 90 minutes. While the story is around 150 small pages.
I was irritated that the police surgeon was conflated with Maigret’s GP in the film. Can’t see such a thing happening, even in the bad old days.
I though that the same shed was used as a taxi drivers garage near the beginning of the film and as a bus garage at the very end, although I have not checked back. A bit cheapskate if true!
I was pleased to see the thedrinksbusiness, missing from RPPL for some months now, was on case back in 2016. See references 4 and 5.
According to something turned up by Bing: ‘Montmartre district in Paris, from Latin Mons Martyrum "Martyrs' Mount," in reference to St. Denis, first bishop of Paris, who was beheaded here with two companions in 258. The older name was Mons Mercurii’. Clear enough from the modern name, but I had never thought of it before.
Checking, I find that Maigret is indeed smoking his pipe in the last story, Maigret et Monsieur Charles (reference 6). I don’t think Simenon ever gave up either, although I dare say he cut down.
I resisted the temptation to turn the takes of the film into an Excel worksheet for statistical analysis. A couple of hours work?
Conclusions
All grist to the mill of how we consume stories and how that consumption reaches consciousness.
A reminder that the business of a film is more to entertain, rather than, in this case, to please Maigret buffs with a careful visualisation of the original story. Also that the world of Paris in the 1940s and 1950s is a lot more alien, a lot more foreign, to today’s young people than it is to people of my own generation. Furthermore, as with Agatha Christie, the stories would have been set more or less in the present as far as the original readership was concerned. Not costume dramas at all.
From where I associate to the misleading saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Misleading because only true when the viewer has been trained, in one way or another, to read the sort of picture in question – and for that one needs words. Maybe a more accurate, if less catchy, version would be: 'a picture cashes in a thousand words'.
PS: to my surprise ‘cheapskate’ was not in OED, but it did make it to Websters, giving as authority one Frances Williams Browin, a US writer who lived 1898—1986. So it must be a bit of US slang which crept into both the Eustace and the Toller vocabulary somehow.
References
Reference 1: Maigret et la Jeune Morte – Georges Simenon – 1954. The second story in Volume XVIII of the Rencontre edition of 1968.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maigret_(2022_film).
Reference 3: https://www.jpbox-office.com/fichfilm.php?id=21703.
Reference 4: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2016/05/gerard-depardieu-resolves-to-give-up-booze/.
Reference 5: https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/.
Reference 6: Maigret et Monsieur Charles – Georges Simenon – 1972. The last story in Volume XXVIII of the Rencontre edition of 1973.
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