Maigret (2022)

An old and tired Commissioner Maigret (an authentically old and tired looking Gérard Depardieu), fighting with ailing health and what looks a lot like depression, is tasked to clear up the murder of an unidentified young woman who was found dead wearing a pre-war evening dress. His investigations will eventually lead him to the dirty, self-centred secrets of the rich, as is so often the case.

Of course, as often happens in the Maigret books by Georges Simenon, as well as in many of their adaptations, solving the mystery isn’t really what’s central to veteran filmmaker Patrice Leconte’s Maigret. Rather, it’s a film immersing itself and the viewer in its main character’s investigative technique of just listening, trying to avoid judgement (yet not compassion), letting things develop slowly and carefully, and only causing as much damage to the people in whose lives he becomes involved as is strictly necessary.

The film is pervaded by a mood of old-man melancholia, which makes a lot of sense given the ages of its director/screenwriter and its star. This isn’t a sadness based on empty nostalgia for some golden past – the Maigrets and Lecontes of this world know all too well that such a thing never existed to pretend otherwise – but something caused by the realization of one’s slow but inexorable slipping away into darkness, and the personal losses incurred. In this version of Maigret’s particular case, there’s also the quiet desperation one can begin to feel when looking at a world that never seems to change for the better for long; or at small, perfectly avoidable tragedies like the case at the core of the film that just repeat with mild variations again and again throughout time and space; and at the use or uselessness of always coming into things after the fact, when nothing can be done but containing damage and assigning guilt.

The whole of the film is focussed on this mood, and this group of feelings, the things and truths they lead Maigret to. So much so that being a more straightforward mystery would get in the way of the film’s core interests. Thus, Leconte goes out of his way to ignore all aspects of the script that could be used to build suspense in his audience and only ever shows any interest at all in them when they can be used to further character moments, while ignoring what Hitchcock would have done.

For me, this approach does work rather well, particularly with a central performance by Depardieu that seems to draw performance and actual personality into an unsolvable knot, and a very strong supporting cast of actors young and old – like Jade Labeste playing a young woman in comparable straits to the murder victim, or Aurore Clément as the mother of one of our suspects.

Of course, if you go into this expecting any kind of traditional mystery or police procedural, you will be sorely disappointed; that doesn’t mean Maigret does not successfully achieve exactly what it is setting out to do.