To France in Film: Pigeons and Love

It’s a delightful film that ‘appeared’ to me on three separate days when I surfed the cable guide. That’s a sign. First time I watched My Afternoons with Margueritte I was amused. The French. Vivid characters. The docile-looking son contrasted with his mad old mother, and she contrasted with a serene, well-read elderly woman.

The second time I saw it I appreciated and resonated with its themes of vulnerability, simplicity, and freedom.

This movie reminds me of a world I left long ago. In Taiwan, I lived walking distance to my family and friends. You go downstairs from the apartment building to a noodle shop. The owner is your aunt’s tenant. Walk to a nearby park in sunshine and greenery, you listen to sparrows and gawk at babies in strollers. You greet an old man and he talks. It was all very contained and connected. In my childhood, stories about people we knew swirled and someone was bound to bud in your (parents’) business. There was a sense of belonging.

In My Afternoons the feeling of familiarity and a stranger’s open kinship helps a going-no-where person make a shift. The main character Germain, unloved by his mother all his life, has little to offer the world. After spending time with Margueritte, he wants to give. Eventually he acts upon his affection for her. He loves. He lets his energy flow.

There are funny but not funny scenes (a la David Sedaris). An abandoned single mother calling her son an oaf and whines about the hardship she endured while raising him. Yet she has no problem using a pitchfork to defend him against an abuser. A grade teacher makes ironic, humiliating remarks in class about Germain and renders him extremely apprehensive about reading. Gerard Depardieu is perfect as the closed, large man wearing overalls with small expectations from life -until he finds Margueritte checking out pigeons in a park. She reads Camus to him and enables him to go a world he hasn’t wanted to go: To love more, want more, read more.

Beautiful exchanges of honesty and humor in the dialogue. It kept my attention, even in subtitles. This movie reveals our thirst for a deep connection and how healing childhood wound can free the heart.