La ville est tranquille

BY PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Operatic in its breadth yet almost microscopic in its focus on lives of quiet desperation, the newest movie by the film-maker laureate of the French city of Marseilles is a gritty drama which recalls Robert Altman in his most assured form.

Those who enjoyed the intimate and tender love story Marius et Jeannette or the ultimately joyous affirmation of family in A La Place Du Coeur will find this more deeply tragic. It's a sprawling, sometimes dizzying, panorama of the city which is the star of all Guedegian's films, and is made up like Nashville, say, or Short Cuts of several loosely interconnected stories. But its central character, played by the director's wife, is a woman on the edge of despair.

Michele (Ascaride) works her fingers to the chilled bone in a fishmarket, struggling to support a neo-fascist, alcoholic husband, Claude (Banderet), and a junkie daughter, Fiona (Parmentier), with a babe in arms who prostitutes herself to passersby. When an attempt at a methadone regime goes disastrously wrong, Michele gives up trying to cure Fiona and embarks on a desperate plan to raise money to feed her habit.

If it sounds grim (the scenes of heroin withdrawal have a chilling authenticity to them), it's leavened, as always, by the writer-director's evident respect and affection for characters whose prototypes he clearly knows well. Guedigian's Marseilles is, like the real one, pulsing with life, much of it ugly, none of it improbable.

Inevitably, perhaps even deliberately, the film loses momentum at times and some of the characters (Claude, for example, and a complacent architect whose marital ennui is a perfect counterpoint to Michele's domestic chaos) have more than a whiff of stereotype about them.

But the director's kinetic, lightweight camerawork keeps things moving along and the unsentimental and understated performances keep it clear of melodrama. And the soundtrack, which mixes Arab-African music with the best use of Janis Joplin you'll ever hear on screen, is a cracker.

In the end, and despite some appalling events, the film leaves us with hope. It may only be a glimmer and it is a hard road to get to it, but this is unquestionably a film of considerable mastery by a man on top of his game.

Cast: Ariane Ascaride, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Pierre Banderet, Gerard Meylan

Director: Robert Guedigian

Running time: 132 minutes

Rating: R18 (violence, language, drug use, sex scenes)

Screening: Lido, from Thursday.