This Wednesday, February 23 is released on French screens “Maigret and the young dead”. Patrice Leconte is adapting a novel by Georges Simenon for the second time after Monsieur Hire. And it is Gérard Depardieu who plays the role of the famous commissioner. An aging Maigret in 1950s Paris.
The film begins at the doctor’s. It’s an elderly Maigret who is examined and advised to retire. But that’s without counting on the stubbornness of the famous commissioner. However, he will quit smoking. Gérard Depardieu therefore portrays an elderly commissioner without his legendary pipe. He must investigate the murder of a young underage girl against the backdrop of a sordid history of morals.
He who gives advice to distance himself from his collaborator, the case fills him with emotion. We understand that he himself lost his only daughter at the same age.
Gérard Depardieu is very delicate in the role of the aging commissioner, short of breath, entangled in his carcass. And Patrice Leconte makes a very beautiful adaptation faithful to the era of the novel in the Paris of the 1950s and to the humorous writing of Georges Simenon.