LE GARCU (83)

Directed by: Maurice Pialat

Starring: Gerard Depardieu, Geraldine Pailhas, Antoine Pialat

The Pitch: The crumbling marriage (or is it relationship?) of a middle-aged man, the father of a 3-year-old son.

Theo Sez: It sounds pretentious to say so, but this is actually supposed to be a little confusing : it's no accident, nor is it ineptitude, that it doesn't supply us with the usual signposts - what the protagonist does for a living, where the action is taking place (the early scenes, set on a tropical island during what turns out to be a family vacation, are especially mysterious) - or that it doesn't explain, much less spell out, the relationships between the various people who come and go around our hero (we have to figure them out for ourselves). The adult world is a mess, disorientating and full of ambiguities, full of things flickering and half-glimpsed ; the little boy, on the other hand, is transparently, unequivocally there, treating everyone with the same happy equanimity, lost in his innocent world of jolly games and great discoveries. The film's great tragedy is that our hero, who loves his son deeply, is nonetheless too caught up in himself and his own world to ever get close to the boy - when we see them for the last time the kid is laughingly trying to feed his father a slice of ham, except that there's a closed window between them. Depardieu, in his subtlest performance for many years, uses his squashed-up mug and hulking body (especially when he's watching the boy from the sidelines, unwanted) to create a beautiful portrait of a sad man - immature, self-centred, occasionally vulgar, forever unable to see what he's doing wrong. That the three-year-old boy is played by the real-life son of director Pialat - who is in his seventies, and will almost certainly not be able to play as big a part as he would like in his son's life - only makes the film even more achingly poignant.