French director Jean Becker talks to Peter Calder about the art of keeping it simple.
Nurture seems to have been every bit as strong as nature in the making of the distinguished French film-maker Jean Becker.
The florid, moustachioed 78-year-old is the director (and, in most cases, the writer) of a dozen features, only three of which have been released here: the little-seen sleepy pastoral charmer The Children of the Marshland followed by Conversations With My Gardener which made quite an impression on arthouse audiences and now his new film, My Afternoons with Margueritte.
This latter won't disappoint those who enjoyed the earlier work. An adaptation of a popular 2008 novel, it's the story of Germain (the ubiquitous Gerard Depardieu), a barely literate factory hand and the relationship he develops with Margueritte (French stage legend Gisele Casadesus, 95 at the time the film was shot), a cultured old woman he meets in a park.
The difference in years - and body weight - seem to count for nothing as she, reading extracts from the book she is always carrying and talking about a lifetime of reading, opens up to him a world that he has never known.
Margueritte is, like Becker's earlier work, distinguished by a contemplative, unhurried rhythm, a gentleness of tone and a sense of nostalgia.
Becker is the son of one of France's most famous directors, Jacques Becker, who worked with Jean Renoir in the 1930s and is now, a half century after his death, revered as one of the leading lights of French cinema. And although the son was always going to be a film-maker - "I had so much admiration for my father that I always wanted to work in that same world," he says - it is his memories of childhood that drive his cinematic vision.
Born in 1933, he had no sense of the war that enveloped his country.
"I never saw the war. I lived in the countryside and even though my father was imprisoned by the Nazis I was somehow untouched. I grew up in a small village, where I had animals and went fishing and played in the countryside and the forest. I had an idyllic life. When I look back it is to those very happy memories of very early childhood."
That contentment infuses his films where his characters are in a state of transition, but quite without pain or even conflict.
"Absolutely," agrees Becker. "These are gentle films, and I suppose that is against the sex and the violence, which is what so many films are about.
"And I suppose I am nostalgic too. There was a very well-known philosopher in France called Claude Levi-Strauss, and he said 'I don't like this century', meaning the 21st. I am quite like him. I am nostalgic for what I have lived through."
His appetite for simple stories explains why he was attracted to Marie Sabine-Roger's novel.
"When I first read the book I fell in love with Germain's character. In a sense, he allowed me to tell a story that was the opposite of the Conversations story. In that case it was the painter talking to the gardener, the intellectual learning something from the simpler man; in this case the simple man - well, he's clumsy and uneducated - is learning from this cultured old lady."
In the hands of two great actors,the film flirts with sentimentality at times but works because it keeps things very simple.
"I like making simple movies," says Becker. "My father often said to me, good directing is directing you don't notice.
"My way of directing is, therefore, all about accompanying the development of my characters and I always have the same aim: that, after people watch one of my films, they leave a little different from when they arrived."
Lowdown
Who: Gerard Depardieu and Gisele Casadesus with director Jean Becker.
What: My Afternoons with Margueritte
When: Opens Thursday
- TimeOut
