Memory and longing can make of our lives a continuous present tense in which those we've lost have dinner with us, in which we can call them from the grave whenever we wish, in which we can kill them as often as we like. And if we are the pretty, hyperactive daughter of demented (Italian? Spanish?) mother and pastis-drowned father, living in a nightmare suburban project in Marseilles among the walking driftwood and the detritus of loving humanity, in which crime is a career and rape a rite of passage, we are seven, seventeen, twenty-seven in the same moment while the hybrid sounds of Euro/Algerian/Camerounian music, chewing, cursing, laughing, fighting, sexing, loving, accompany us perpetually as in the old melodrama, except that it is so alive, funny, moving, devastating and rescuing all at once that we are enthralled and left with the happy/sad feeling of a life lived. A movie to be lived in and remembered with fondness.
