La Ville est tranquille (2000) - film review

On the surface, Marseilles appears to be a town at ease with itself, yet social problems run ever deeper and, for its inhabitants, life is anything but tranquil.  Michèle works in the fish market and barely earns enough to support her long-term unemployed husband and her teenage daughter.  The latter funds her craze for drugs through prostitution, the result being an unwanted pregnancy.  Viviane, a music teacher, has grown to despise her womanising husband Yves, who talks a lot about supporting socialist causes without doing anything; she starts an affair with a young black man, Abderramane, whom she met in a prison workshop.  Paul, a former dockworker, has used his redundancy pay-off to buy a car to start his own taxi business.  Middle-aged, he lives alone and struggles in vain to find a partner.  Michèle is all too willing to take his money, in return for favours.  Gérard is a sombre bartender who deals in drugs and plans to assassinate an extreme rightwing sympathiser.  With growing unemployment, a greater proportion of the white population is drawn towards fascist politics, whilst the non-whites are the targets of abuse and discrimination.   So many problems, so much grief... Yet, on the surface, Marseilles appears to be so at ease with itself...

In this ambitious living fresco, Robert Guédiguian paints what is probably his grimmest picture of the town of Marseilles.  The sunny optimism of his previous films - Marius et Jeannette (1997), À la place du Coeur (1998) – is replaced by a sense of dark irony, and there is noticeably less poetry in his realistic portrayal of ordinary men and women facing up to hardship and adversity.  The bleakness of this outlook makes this less accessible than the director’s other films, and Guédiguian’s attempt to encompass so many themes within a single film is only partly successful.  There’s enough subject matter here for at least three films, and one of the frustrations with this film is the way it switches between social issues without tackling any one in the depth it merits.  More than ever, Guédiguian relies on his lead actors – in particular his muse, the extraordinary Ariane Ascaride – to hold the thing together and convey some sense of intimacy in what is a dauntingly large canvas.

© James Travers 2005

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