À la place du coeur (1998) - film review

Clim and Bébé have been close friends since childhood, growing up together on the housing estates of Marseilles.  Clim is white, Bébé is black.  Aged 16 and 18 respectively, they discover they are in love and find a small place to live together.  Shortly after Clim discovers she is pregnant, Bébé is arrested by a racist policeman and wrongly convicted of raping a tourist.  Their only hope is to find the rape victim and persuade her that Bébé was not the culprit.  Unfortunately, she has returned to Sarajevo...

Director Robert Guédiguian followed his critically acclaimed film Marius et Jeannette with this equally compelling and distinctive tale of love and strife in the poor region of Marseilles.   A characteristic of Guédiguian’s films is how he brings a sense of nobility and depth to ordinary working class people, something which gives his films a strikingly poignant humanist slant.  With skilful use of flashbacks, this film tells the story from the perspective of a young pregnant mother, an approach which gives the film a pleasing intimacy without needless sentimentality.

Whilst the tone of À la place du coeur is predominantly optimistic (the warmth of the main characters mirrored by the sunny photography), the realities of life on the margins is never far from the surface.  The vulnerability of a pregnant teenager whose boyfriend is locked away, the enduring torment of the rape victim, the anguish of a mother who is prepared to do anything to get her future son-in-law freed  from jail…  All of these rich, complex emotions are there, an essential part of the tapestry of the film, but wedded with this harsh social realism is a constant belief that things will turn out fine in the end, that human suffering is not a natural state of affairs.  Guédiguian’s depiction of the everyday life of ordinary working class people is both uplifting and poetic, yet it is also informed, honest and very credible.

© James Travers 2002

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