Dark side of tranquille Marseille

10 April 2012

The town of the title is Marseille. Seen from above, it appears as a delightful sun-drenched port, the pleasing sounds of the sea and children's voices underpinning the simple piano music of Eric Satie on the soundtrack.

A small boy in an overlarge tailcoat plays an electric piano al fresco for a rapt audience sitting on the grass. It is a portrait of an urban idyll. But it tells only a fraction of the story.

The tranquillity is superficial. Beneath the carapace of the port there is a seething cauldron of racial conflict, unemployment, drugs and crime barely contained by politicians of the Left and Right promoting Marseille as tourist-friendly.

Director Robert Guédiguian has been exploring the subtext and subculture of Marseille throughout his career. La Ville est Tranquille is his ninth movie and he has emerged as a sublime humanist auteur in the tradition of Jean Renoir and Ken Loach. Primarily interested in the socialist politics and plight of the working class in his home town, he brings a similarly enduring faith in humanity though he is more inclined towards optimism than Loach and is certainly more ironic. The opening shot is a deliberate manipulation which lulls us into a lazy complacency - a mood that is soon punctured.

Like John Sayles's masterly City of Hope, Guédiguian's film entwines the lives of several families and individuals who cross-fertilise throughout. Principal player is Michele (Ariane Ascaride), who works as a fish packer in the docks. With her peroxide crop, ill-advisedly short skirts and stilettos, Michele resembles the kind of ageing mod that might have tottered through a Mike Leigh film.

She may look like a caricature but her plight is real enough. Her husband is on the dole and slouches around the apartment drinking pastis, uttering the occasional tirade against immigrants for his condition. Her single-parent daughter prostitutes herself for drug money. After a hard day's work Michele returns to her high-rise apartment to change and feed her baby granddaughter.

She is capable and hardworking, but life is wearing her down. When she finally puts a stop to her daughter's mercenary sexual activities, but fails to wean her off heroin, she is reduced to buying drugs from Gerard (Gerard Meylan), an enigmatic local bar owner with whom she has some romantic history and who appears to be connected to the darker elements of Marseille.

Meanwhile, Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a lonely docker, takes redundancy against the wishes of his striking co-workers and sets himself-up as a taxi driver. He continues to sink deeper into debt while falsifying his bachelor status with his wellmeaning parents. And a bourgeois politician attempts to justify his compromised negotiations by claiming altruistic motives: "We're the city's plastic surgeons in a way." His social-worker wife is unconvinced. "Before, revolutionaries had every virtue," she ripostes. "Nowadays, reactionaries have every vice."

She teaches music to disadvantaged children and adults and her affair with a black ex-convict whom she has rehabilitated provides a brief moment of happiness.

Guédiguian's secret is to make the relationships and the movement of the film seem as comprehensively random as life itself, yet it is surreptitiously structured with each action creating a reaction that sets the characters and events tumbling like dominoes. The prologue and epilogue featuring a young musical prodigy busking for money to buy a grand piano is Guédiguian's light in the darkness, a candle flame that gutters under the winds of social oppression yet never quite goes out. In spite of the profound sadness engendered by much of the film, it is strangely life-affirming.

Guédiguiann's tone has shifted from the hard-won positivism of A La Place du Coeur and the whimsy of A L'Attaque! to the darker side of human existence. Those who accuse him of blinkered idealism will be silenced by the heightened level of drama and conflict which includes three fatal shootings, one accidental, two deliberate. If this is untypical, even melodramatic, it is seamlessly incorporated into the fabric of the life stories he (and his regular cast) is adept at relating. For some of the characters, life simply runs out. Yet the sun still shines relentlessly and the families are tied by the slenderest of threads - crystallised in a remarkable scene when Michele, cradling her granddaughter in one hand, attempts to comfort her daughter with the other. In one of those moments given by God to the luckiest of film-makers, the baby reaches out a hand and lays it alongside Michele's on her mother's face, connecting three generations in a single gesture.

La Ville est Tranquille is the flipside of Amelie and a film of remarkable, abrasive tenderness. If you see one, it behoves you to see the other.

La Ville Est Tranquille
Cert: 18

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