La ville est tranquille

I guess Robert Guidiguian loves his wife Ariane Ascaride because he photographs her so lovingly but he sure likes to make her suffer. In the only film I can recall off the top of my head in which she had both a husband, child and stable family relationship (the superb Marie-Jo and her 2 loves) she was unable to settle for this and had to take a lover. Normally, as here, she is unhappy in her relationship - assuming she has one and is not a single mother. Here she is really up against it; married to a waste of space who hasn't worked since Ludivine Sagnier made a movie with her clothes on, working herself all night at the fish market, caring for her teenage single mother and junkey with it daughter and getting insults for her pains, and finally turning tricks herself to pay for the monkey on her daughter's back. Against all the odds this is actually a Joy to watch because Ascaride is so luminescent and just one smile can light up Marseilles. As usual the director is flogging his pet hobby-horse and by now he really COULD train a pig to encapsulate it via the refrain Nobody Knows The Truffles I've Seen. For all that he does manage a light touch and most of the vignettes come off thanks to his repertory company of first-rate actors. As long as this cat keeps on churnin em out I'll keep getting it up at the box-office and you can't say fairer than that. 8/10

In the contemporary Marseilles, Michèle (Ariane Ascaride) is a worker in the fishing market. She supports her family, composed by her unemployed husband, her addicted daughter Fiona (Julie-Marie Parmentier) and her granddaughter Ameline. Fiona prostitutes to buy drugs. Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is a stevedore, who betrays his colleagues and the union in a strike and buy a taxi with his indemnity. Gérard (Gérard Meylan) is a mysterious owner of a bar. Abderramane (Alexandre Ogou) is a black man who left jail and has an affair with a bourgeois. The lives of these characters are interconnected along the story. This movie is about ordinary people and touches in serious wounds in most of the worldwide societies, like unemployment, drugs, violence, crime, prostitution, prejudice against immigrants, loneliness, racism, low salaries, corrupts politicians. There is one particular scene that really touched me, when Michèle comments that only books have happy end. The title "The Town is Quiet" is very ironical and unfortunately the plot shows reality. I do not know if Robert Guédiquian wants to give some hope to the viewer, with that boy magnificently playing the piano he has finally bought in the end, but I found the story very bitter and pessimist. The direction and the performance of the cast are outstanding, and the soundtrack is excellent, highlighting Janis Joplin singing 'Summertime' and 'Cry Baby'. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): 'A Cidade Está Tranquila' ("The Town is Quiet")

For a lot of cine buffs ,Marseille evokes the Pagnol Trilogy "Marius" ("Marius et Jeanette,get it?) "Cesar" and "Fanny".But be here now.This is 2000,no longer the thirties."La ville est tranquille" is a thoroughly contemporary movie,the despair of which sometimes recalling such works as "Rosetta".

Actually,it recalls in its form,Julien Duvivier's work,his movies made up of sketches particularly "sous le ciel de Paris"(1952) when all the subplots came together in an almost seamless whole.And as for despair

,Duvivier's movies were pessimism flesh on the bone. Guédiguian's story is more realist,more loachesque ,less melodramatic maybe less storybook or lyrical too.But that does not make a great difference:Duvivier and Kenneth Loach are influences every director can be proud of.

The backbone of "la ville est tranquille" (what an euphemism!) is a mother's struggle with her daughter's addiction,filmed with a realism hard to match.This is an absurd fight,because she's alone -she goes as far as prostituting herself to buy drugs-and because she actually helps her daughter in her fall.

But there are a lot of subplots,most of them as absorbing as the main story :sometimes they interfere with it .The taxi driver sequences,for instance ,do not seem to have a lot to do with it,but after a while a strong connection appears.And before the meeting,we already know the character:a man who 's not found a woman who's got what it takes,he's an old bachelor whose father and mother are longing to see him settled down.these parents are the only characters that have got something of Marcel Pagnol,they are definitely people of the past,not only because they are old,but because class struggle which they championed has become a thing of the past:the sequence in the taxi when the driver sings Pottier's "l'Internationale" in several languages is revealing for that matter.

Mini subplots give the movie substance:a meeting with a disquieting far right leader has a strong contemporary feel:"we like the Aliens,but we do prefer the French (of French extraction).Only the bourgeois couple and its sentimental -and intellectual - problems are irrelevant.

spoilers spoilers spoilers "La ville est tranquille" manages to give the audience a good dose of optimism though.one of the opening shots a young boy playing the piano in order to buy one :he's an Alien too and this vision is almost surrealist.At the very end of the movie ,when the audience seems to have lost any hope,a truck brings the piano to the child prodigy who begins to play.Then a crowd (of rejected?) gathers and ,for a while ,forgets all about its burden. end of spoilers

If there had been any doubts ,this movie finally and firmly placed R.Guédiguian among the greatest,most ambitious directors contemporary French cinema has produced.

A very humanistic film. The persons appearing are really of flesh and blood. Marseille and even France is described as a stagnating society where fascism and racism is increasing. The old methods of the socialist/communist movement to improve the living conditions are generally regarded as obsolete. This is of course a very pessimistic view. But in the same time we feel that the film is taking side for the oppressed persons. Besides the misery we also meet men and women with warm hearts. The way the persons appear and how the story is told is so captivating that this must be regarded as one of the great films this year.

This is a production not so much of the French film industry as the Marseille `film co-operative' headed by Robert Guédiguian (`Marius et Jeanette', `A la place du cour'). The same group have been making low-budget films on the theme of working class life for 20 years, and on the evidence of this one they are just getting better. What distinguishes their films is not so much the left –wing viewpoint mixed with obscure French philosophy (sorry M. Foucault) both of which are present, but an interesting combination of super-realist, almost documentary presentation and a decidedly melodramatic storyline.

In this film Ariane Ascaride plays a woman in her late thirties, old before her time, who is the sole support of her family (hubby has been out of work for three years). She toils by night in the fish markets, but this is not enough. Her 16 year old daughter, Fiona (Julie-Marie Parmentier) has already both a baby and a serious heroin addiction. After finding her daughter doing oral sex for money in the living room of their tiny flat, Michèle goes on the game herself, with no great success, although she does enlist the rather dopey Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a docker turned taxi-diver, as a regular customer. She turns to an old acquaintance, Gérard (Gérard Meylan), to supply her with heroin for Fiona. Meanwhile, Viviane (Christine Brucher), a drama teacher from a more refined neighbourhood, becomes involved with Abderramane, (Alexandre Ogou) a young black ex-con she had met while teaching a group of prisioners. Needless to say, things do not go smoothly. The storylines are topped and tailed by the quest of a Armenian immigrant boy for a decent piano to match his precocious talent.

The film is beautifully crafted; the various stories are brought together in a powerful and shocking conclusion. The scenes between mother and daughter are painful to watch, but justifiably so. Their situation is really not much to do with politics and Foucault, after all drugs plague the middle class as well, but Michèle has only her daughter. Pitched against the personal tragedy there is the plight of the workers as a whole; cast out of employment by mechanisation on the docks they are driven into the arms of the neo-fascists, to whom, of course, they are mere cannon–fodder. But the political viewpoint of the film is suggestive rather than strident, more a background to the personal dramas than the main theme, which what happens to personal relationships when put under unbearable pressure.

Despite the drama and tragedy, there is some subtle humour in the film. Where a flashback sequence is required at one point the director uses a clip from a movie made by him 20 years ago which happens to feature the same actors. There is the bumbling but kind-hearted cabbie, his retired left-wing parents and Michèle's husband to provide some amusement also. The look and feel of Marseille is conveyed beautifully; this reviewer last visited the place 25 years ago and got the distinct feeling that the tatty but colourful town of those days is now distinctly uglier and a great deal more dangerous. Guédiguian, however, has not given up on the place and he and his troupe continue to tell compelling stories of Marseille life.