It's a love story," says director Robert Guediguian of his eighth feature Marius et Jeannette and he's insistent about its milieu, "I don't believe in love stories between the rich, they are always stories of property, organised marriages, money or power. No, it's a love story amongst the poor - there, there are no other issues at stake in the fact of living together - if anything, only extra worries."
Accordingly, the film is set in the very specific locale of L'Estaque, to the north of Marseilles, where Guediguian's characters Marius and Jeannette come together. Marius lives in a huge disused cementworks, which overlooks the district, and is guarding it prior to its demolition. Jeanette is the single mother of two children; she works as a check-out girl and raises her children in a tiny house on a Mediterranean courtyard. Her neighbours Caroline, Justine, Monique and Dede form a friendly, raucous community that, for Guediguian, "resembles a Greek chorus that allows me to intervene in the crucial debate about the aioli recipe - garlic is a plant that proves the class system still exists, at least on the level of the taste buds. It also allows me to advertise the newspaper L'Humanite - which isn't doing very well - and Le Monde Diplomatique - which is doing very well - and to insist on the fact that to vote for Le Pen, even once, is once too many." In other words, Marius et Jeannette is a love story wit completely contemporary context.
Guediguian himself hails from the Marseilles working-class, born to an Armenian docker father and a German mother. The film's environment supports the theory that there is a current in French cinema that is looking back to the social-comedy model of the 30s typified by Jean Renoir - a socially concerned cinema that is anti-didactic and which places its characters within a wider community. If it's a utopian vision, all the better insists Guediguian, "we have to re-enchant the world". Chris Darke
Prod co: AGAT films & Cie
Prod: Gilles Sandoz
Dir: Robert Guediguian
Scr: Robert Guediguian, Jean-Louis Milesi
Ph: Bernard Cavalie
Art dir: Karim Hamzaoui
Ed: Bernard Sasia
Cast: Ariane Ascaride, Gerard Meylan, Pascale Roberts
Running time: 102 mins
Int sales: Distribution Diaphana
