La ville est tranquille

Robert Guédiguian can rightly be described as the chroniqueur of his home city of Marseilles. That city is an apparently inexhaustible source for his films, in which the situation of the working classes is studied in a classic way. The ironically titled La ville est tranquille opens with a panoramic picture of the city: the camera slowly turns 360 degrees and shows the centre, the quays, the sea and the working-class districts nestled up against the hills. This is exemplary for the film’s ambition, inhabited as it is by a large number of characters who eventually come together in what is now known as an Altmanesque way. The Madonna of Sorrows is Michèle, a 40 year-old woman who earns her money at the fish auction. Her husband is sitting at home, chronically ill and bitter, her daughter has a baby and a serious drug problem that will lead to her a demise. The other main character, the bachelor Paul, has used his lay-off money to buy a taxi. He is the one who will try take to help Michèle. Guédiguian made his film a gripping ode to his city. He paints with a firm hand a picture of ultra-right politics, machinations, drug dealing, either hautaine or politically correct haute bourgeois, the apparently fixed place given to ‘minorities’, in other words, la vie au bord de la mer.