My Afternoons with Margueritte (2010)

Gérard Depardieu plays a simple man — a man who is supposed to be something of a simpleton — who encounters an old lady (sounds so much better in Spanish, una anciana, or someone in her third life stage) on a park bench. They bond over the pigeons he names for her. She reads to him from Camus's The Plague.

Ebert had it this way:
Germain believes he cannot read. Actually, we discover later, he was taught to read but never taught to have a shred of self-confidence. She begins to read to him — The Plague by Camus — and he is an ideal listener. With her as his catalyst, he makes slow steps toward self-esteem.

Through flashbacks, his lack of self-esteem is explained. At the root of it, lies his mother. The films has all the elements of a good work, but never quite sparkles. Ebert gave it three stars. I give it two. I found it quite similar to Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which I liked much better.


Mediocre.

Stuff

Frost, Randy O., and Gail Steketee. Stuff: compulsive hoarding and the meaning of thing.    616.8522 F


As psychopathologies go, hoarding is relatively new but unquestionably fashionable. E.L. Doctorow published a novel last year ("Homer and Langley") about the Collyer brothers, the Manhattan recluses whose five-story brownstone, in 1947, yielded 170 tons of closely packed objects, including 14 grand pianos and the brothers' corpses.

There are no authoritative statistics on hoarding in America, but the authors suggest that it is a more widespread phenomenon than is generally realized. There are therapists who deal exclusively with hoarders and specialized cleaning crews with more business than they can handle.

Art of choosing

Reviews.