Rendez-Vous ’26: Maigret and the Dead Lover

This year marks the ninety-fifth birthday of Georges Simenon’s famous French sleuth, Inspector Jules Maigret, who was born middle-aged and nursed on beer and apple brandy. PBS’s new, younger Maigret was pretty good, but he wasn’t really Maigret. This is the Maigret you know and probably love. Mrs. Maigret definitely loves him too, so he really doesn’t give a toss about anyone else. However, he is a professional, so he diligently works to solve his latest case, just like always, in Pascal Bonitzer’s Maigret and the Dead Lover, adapted from Simenon’s less diplomatic-sounding Maigret and the Old People, which screens again during the 2026 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Even though Maigret drinks like a fish, he has a reputation for discretion, so he is assigned the potentially politically sensitive case of retired ambassador mysteriously shot multiple times by an unknown person or persons. Despite his calm, workmanlike investigative approach, Maigret’s patience will be sorely tested by his sole witness, Jacqueline “Jacotte” Larrieu, who is stone-deaf without her hearing aids. She also seems to think it is her duty to the foreign ministry to be as unforthcoming as possible.

Regardless, Maigret soon discovers the ambassador and the Princess Isi de Vuynes openly carried romantic torches for each other, despite her marriage of duty to another blue blood. Both families knew of their true love, but the not quite lovers always accepted their duties and their fate. Hence, they waited to reunite until her aristocratic husband might die, which ever so coincidentally happened a week prior.

Maigret is a tricky role to cast, because he is the polar opposite of flashy. What distinguishes the Inspector is his world-weary fatalism and his understated mordant wit. Frankly, Charles Laughton was probably too flamboyant in The Man of the Eiffel Tower, even though he was jolly entertaining to watch. Jean Gabin, Harry Baur, and Rupert Davies were all much closer to Simenon’s Maigret.

Denis Podalydes truly makes a pitch perfect Maigret, gliding through the film with a general spirit of disappointment, but never surprise. He also shares some charming chemistry with the great Irene Jacob. We instantly get all their intimate years spent together and all the bottles of wine they polished off in each other’s company.

Angelopoulos’s The Dust of Time

Even for Greek Communists exiled after the Civil War, the USSR was a cold, inhospitable place to live. The mother of Greek-American filmmaker “A” was eventually sentenced to a Siberian gulag and his father was deported, yet somehow, they still managed to find each other again. Their story inspired A’s film within the film, but memory is a tricky thing and so is the narrative approach in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Dust of Time, which screens as part of the UCLA Library Film & TV Archive’s Angelopoulos retrospective, Landscape of Time.

A's latest film is based on the letters his mother Eleni wrote to his father Spyros, while she was banished to a Siberian gulag. Even though he is filming in the illustrious Cinecetta studio in Italy, he is distracted by personal problems, mostly those generated by his disturbed daughter, also named Eleni. It appears she ran away from home, but on the plus side, he finds one of his mother’s missing letters in her room.

Flashing back to early 1950s Temirtau in Kazakhstan, where the Greek exiles had set up their own Soviet style colony, A’s parents are briefly reunited. He had assumed the identity of a dead comrade to sneak her out, but they are discovered by the other Communists. Ironically, Eleni would then spend decades with their torch-carrying Jewish family-friend, Jacob, who would become a Refusenik during his long tenure in the gulag with her.

Angelopoulos’s temporal shifts can be especially confusing, because of the way he blends the time periods in the transitional scenes, with A appearing in the past, or his youthful parents seemingly walking through the present (circa Y2K New Year’s Eve), but that also gives the film a rather striking sense of un-reality. Dust of Time also features a gorgeous score composed by the late Angelopoulos’s regular collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou. The “Dance Theme,” heard performed by a full orchestra in a recording session for A’s film and as a piano solo performed by Spyros, is wonderfully melancholy and nostalgic-sounding.

Dust is a lovely film to look at and listen to, but it still manages to capture the bleakness of the Soviet Communism—rather surprisingly so, given the general ideological tenor of contemporary Greek art house cinema. With wide, wide-swept shots of the mean, Brutalist gulag buildings and the icy surrounding tundra, Angelopoulos and cinematographer Andreas Sinanos vividly evoke the loneliness of Siberian exile. The scene of Jacob translating in a storeroom full of Stalin statues and paintings, hastily withdrawn from public display in the early days of the Khrushchev thaw, is also wonderfully surreal.

The late great Bruno Ganz gave one of the best performances of his accomplished career as the tragically friend-zoned Jacob. Irene Jacob also shows tremendous range portraying both the youthful-gulag-bound and grandmotherly Eleni. Of course, Willem Dafoe broods dependably as “A”—after the fifth or sixth time you write out “Angelopoulos,” you start to appreciate the brevity of his one-initial name (never actually heard in the film itself).