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Bon Appetit review: The enormous appeal of Gerard Depardieu eating

The French actor eating his way around Europe isn't entirely pleasant to watch, but gee it's hard to tear your eyes away.

Karl Quinn

He may not be a household name in this country any more, but Gerard Depardieu is huge – in every sense of the word.

Back in the 1980s and early '90s, the Frenchman was as big as it gets in arthouse cinema. He acted alongside Robert De Niro in Bertolucci's 1900; he was the tragic hunchback in Jean de Florette; he was a big-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac; he was a medieval war veteran who might or might not have been the man he claimed to be in The Return of Martin Guerre. He was magnificent.

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Gérard Depardieu travels through different European regions looking for their famous local specialities, identity and history.

For a time, Depardieu was so big that not speaking English didn't stop him starring (with Andie MacDowell) in Peter Weir's charming American romantic comedy Green Card.

These days, Depardieu is bigger than ever, but in all the wrong ways. Leave aside his various transgressions – peeing in a bottle on a plane; falling off his scooter while tanked; becoming a Russian citizen and vigorous defender of Vladimir Putin, who, he claimed, liked his "hooligan spirit". He is now simply massive.

At 67, he looks like an inflatable man filled to bursting point with helium; one more wafer-thin mint slice, you suspect, and he'll go the way of Monsieur Creosote in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.

That's what makes Bon Appetit: Gerard Depardieu's Europe (SBS, Saturdays at 5.30pm) so transfixing, in spite of its many flaws: the possibility that at any moment its big-name star might turn into a supernova, filling the screen with his enormous exploding energy seconds after chowing down on some regional delicacy or other. From Le Grande Bouffe to the Big Bang, just like that.

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And my, doesn't Gerard love to chow down? As he skips from Brittany (episode one) to Scotland (episode two) to the Basque region in south-western France (episode three) to Napoli (episode four), we are assailed – nay, assaulted – with images of him munching on everything from seaweed to steak, from black pudding to langoustine legs. He devours his food with the brio of one whose last square meal came months ago, though you can bet his last circular, triangular and rhomboid meals were more recent than that.

Gerard Depardieu with Nathalie Baye in The Return of Martin Guerre (1982).

A much slimmer Gerard Depardieu with Nathalie Baye in The Return of Martin Guerre (1982).

A woman I know used to work as the live-in cook for Depardieu and his then-wife Carol Bouquet. She once told me the man of the house was often to be found at the door of the refrigerator late at night, chomping on a wheel of camembert and swigging red wine straight from the bottle. He was, and still is, a man of enormous appetites, and those appetites have made him enormous.

Depardieu has two travelling companions in his jaunt around Europe in search of local food traditions and the people upholding them: his walking stick (though scaffold might be a better word; without it, he might just collapse) and the chef Laurent Audiot.

Audiot cooks at one of the two Parisian restaurants Depardieu owns (one for lunch, one for dinner, I presume). He seems the more informed of the pair as they chat to various producers, but that's to be expected: a chef ought to know a bit about his produce, whereas the diner – even when the diner is also the owner – need only know how it tastes.

Whether it's seaweed or steak, Gerard Depardieu never met a food he didn't like.

Whether it's seaweed or steak, Gerard Depardieu never met a food he didn't like. Photo: SBS TV

The pair chat in a fairly rambling, haphazard way with fisherman, farmers, grocers, even the occasional crime novelist. It's a bit like The Trip, but without the jokes and the Michael Caine impersonations. Still, there are some laughs, especially when they bicker.

There are nuggets of information buried in there too, but I suspect the pair must have spent their entire budget on food and drink, and so couldn't afford an editor. The 10 hour-long episodes would have been far more palatable at half that length.

But asking Gerard Depardieu to trim down? Fat chance of that.

Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin