More Maigret

To round things out, we watched the episode of Gambon's Maigret which figured in the last post yesterday evening. A genial adaptation, true to the spirit of the original. And we thought that an Atkinson version would be less true, would be much noisier and busier. The director would probably say that he was being truer to the gritty and rough low-life Paris of the thirties and forties, tearing away the Simenon comfort blanket - which may be true, but which does not make for better pensioner viewing in consequence.

Not for the first time, slightly surprised at how much of the detail gets left out. Sixty minutes nothing like enough for 150 pages. Perhaps also a question of attention span, in that if the director packs too much in, the viewer gets a bit tired and congested.

At the same time, I noticed that the director had popped in lots of references or allusions to this or that which would have little if any meaning to someone who had not read the story, even if one tried watching it again to make sure one had not missed anything. Perhaps the thing in question does not lift very readily from the page to the screen, cannot be readily captured in a neat verbal or visual image; the point of its inclusion is to please the cognoscenti among the viewers, not to round out the story.

Maybe another episode will follow this evening.

Reference 1: Maigret et la Grande Perche - Simenon - 1951 - Vol.XVI of the collected works.

Reference 2: Maigret and the Burglar's Wife - Gambon & Ratcliff respectively - 1992.