Gérard Depardieu at the time of the big departure

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

How long has Gérard Depardieu been preparing for his death in the cinema? For a long time, no doubt, given the tempestuous, death-cheating, self-destructive character of the gallery of magnificent characters he bequeaths to French cinema.

However, the question arose when the actor, reached in his flesh by the threatening shadow of the camarde, himself entered in the course of the 2000s in the throes of age and illness. Twilight Singer (when i was a singer, by Xavier Giannoli, 2006); medium between two worlds (The big nightby Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, 2012; A beautiful inner sun, by Claire Denis, 2017); retired worker looking for his points (Mammut, of Delépine and Kervern, 2010); dictator ending (Stalin’s couch, by Fanny Ardant, 2017); cop at the end of the road (Maigret, by Patrice Leconte, 2022)… examples abound.

This propensity to measure up to the abyss can also be explained by the temptation, for directors themselves facing the vicissitudes of old age, to find in Gérard Depardieu the most royal of alter egos. And this is how, following a natural inclination to the film industry, we find ourselves today faced with Green shutters by Jean Becker. And it is, after the adaptation of Patrice Leconte, still Simenon. But in the unusual exercise of a 1950 novel, which recounts, without suspense or motive, the death of a sacred monster of the boards, succumbing to its excesses as well as to its deep incomprehension of the reasons for its own life.

Bitter and touching end

Depardieu here embodies Jules Maugin, a larger-than-life character to whom the screenplay – the last written by Jean-Loup Dabadie before dying (decidedly) in 2020 – does not immediately give very long to live given a failing heart condition and a non-negotiable blood alcohol level. It is at the end, bitter and touching at the same time, of this grandiose life that the story is dedicated. This love (Fanny Ardant) torn from the hero that leaves him forever inconsolable. This old friend (Benoît Poelvoorde) who must be the last to understand him and to put up with his escapades, equally with his faithful costume designer (Anouk Grinberg). This young woman (Stéfi Celma) whom he marries without really believing in it, when he feels he is leaving.

Reported, rather vaguely, to the 1970s, notably softened in comparison with the bitterness of the novel, the film aims to be both a statement on the vanity of glory and, in a more general way, of any destiny in the hour of the great departure. It is however so little detailed, so far from reality, and so obviously riveted to the performance, but also to the supposed intimacy of its main actor, that one begins to think that the film would undoubtedly crumble into dust without the presence of Gérard Depardieu. So that neither the film nor the actor emerged victorious from this mortal challenge.

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