"The day of judgement has arrived. You will die by the end of the Ash Wednesday service." An anonymous letter sent to an ageing Countess (Valentine Tessier) sees the formidable commissaire Maigret (Jean Gabin), the woman's old friend, take an afternoon train to the small village of Saint-Fiacre where he was born, son of the Count's faithful estate manager. "We could never find an estate manager as good. Whenever something went wrong, the Count would say: 'Back in Maigret's day'."
The reunion between Maigret and the Countess results in one of the most touching and beautiful scenes I've ever seen as the old woman yearning for her youth and a man still haunted by it take a long car ride from the train station to the village. "For your wedding, there were tables out on the grass." "I could smell your cologne a mile away." "You were wearing a white dress with flowers." And so on, and so on...
I have never quite seen anyone capture the sadness for lost youth as vividly and hauntingly as Jean Delannoy does in "Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case". The whole film is tinged with nostalgia as Maigret returns to the village of his childhood, the village where he lived with his father, the village his father died in, the village he left his innocence in. Uncharacteristically for the tough policeman, he still sees the village through rose-tinted glasses. He notices only the things that are the same. One gets the impression he is moving with his eyes closed, feeling his way around the Saint Fiacre of his memories.
There's another wonderfully touching scene in which Maigret visits the shop he frequented as a child and finds the same old shopkeeper still working there. "Can I help you, sir," Marie Tatin (Gabrielle Fontan) asks him. "Three pennyworths of candy, Madame Tatin," Maigret replies. It is shocking how quickly this rough-and-tumble rugged man can revert to a knee-high child when overcome with memories. In fact, Jean Gabin is simply superb throughout the film, getting a chance to show a more emotional, wistful side to his tough-guy persona.
And yet, everything has changed and aged and even the nostalgic Maigret will eventually have to come face to face with that fact. The grandiose chateau Maigret remembers as a palace to rival Versaille is now a shadow of its former self. The Countess has sold off most of its contents to pay for the reckless lifestyle of her playboy son Maurice (Michel Auclair). Production designer René Renoux made a masterstroke when designing the chateau set by having all the walls imprinted by outlines of paintings that once hung there. It is a stark reminder that the good old days are gone forever.
Maigret begins recognising this fact by observing the behaviour of the people around him. He is shocked into reality by the way the Countess is treated by her staff, the way the village doctor doesn't bother covering the Countess' chest when examining her heart, and the way the Countess' secretaire (Robert Hirsch) walks around the chateau as if he owns it. As he realizes that, in the words of Thomas Wolfe, you can never go home again, he becomes all the more protective of his memories, going so far as to move to strike a man for saying a bad word about the late Count.
There's a murder in "Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case", of course, but it is far less interesting than the emotional underpinning of the film. It is clearly what fascinated Delannoy and it is the aspect of the film he handles the best. The mystery plot, on the other hand, feels a bit like an afterthought and that is where the film falters.
Unlike the previous Delannoy-Gabin Maigret film "Maigret Sets a Trap", this sequel features a fairly run-of-the-mill plot though involving one of the most diabolical murder weapons I have ever seen. Sadly, the suspects are not as interesting as the ones in the previous film and the conclusion doesn't generate nearly as much suspense and drama.
All the performances are good but besides Gabin and Tessier no one stands out in particular. This is in no small part because their characters are essentially Agatha Christie stereotypes: the priest, the playboy, the hothead etc. There are no attempts on anyone's part to make them as three-dimensional or as complex as their counterparts from "Maigret Sets a Trap". This is a shame.
Whenever the film deals with its Proustian themes of lost youth and nostalgia it is truly a masterpiece. Sadly, these interludes become fewer and farther between as the murder plot sets in motion. Consequently, the film is merely an above-average thriller. This is, of course, no small feat but seeing how great Gabin is and how well Delannoy builds the atmosphere of sadness and decay makes me yearn for a film that would have focused entirely on Maigret's return to the village of his childhood. I enjoyed "Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case" immensely but it had the potential of being a masterpiece had it not been dragged down by a run-of-the-mill murder mystery.
