Portrait of a City in Despair

Intimate and human yet deeply ambitious, a powerhouse of a film made with a disturbing vision, Robert Guediguian’s “The Town Is Quiet” has a title that turns out to be savagely ironic. For if the town in question is anything, it’s anything but quiet.

That would be Marseille, the birthplace of writer-director-producer Guediguian, one of the most prominent of France’s new breed of regional filmmakers. Guediguian has lived in Paris for 25 years, but each of his 10 films has been set in Marseille. Although his earlier works, notably the sunny box-office hit “Marius and Jeanette,” have been well received, they give no hint of the scope of what he has attempted here.

“The Town Is Quiet” opens with a magisterial 360-degree pan of Marseille, with the camera moving slowly around the city’s harbor as an unseen young pianist plays a classical medley. The effect is simultaneously melancholy, lonely and also somewhat intimidating. “The Town Is Quiet” is an X-ray of a city, an involving neo-realistic look at how people on several strata of society try to cope with the desperate circumstances of their lives. It’s a pitiless film, uncompromising in what it shows us.

Yet it is precisely Guediguian’s all-seeing dispassion, his intimate knowledge and unblinking eye for human frailties that make his film so effective. Despite its bleak nature, “The Town Is Quiet” is honest and unexaggerated, never done for effect. And it is wise enough not to offer answers, not to pretend to solutions to personal and societal problems that are far from simple. As the director has said, “I wanted to talk of everything that scares me.”

Although he is a former member of France’s Communist Party, Guediguian (who co-writes his scripts with Jean-Louis Milesi) is anything but didactic. What is just as rare for a politically committed filmmaker, his people are never merely symbolic, but always completely believable and individual. The acting in the film is not just a means to an end, but a satisfying end in itself. The overall picture “Quiet” paints is of a culture that has lost its moorings and a city that is flirting with decline and collapse. Once a workers’ citadel where class identification was strong, Marseille is now a bastion of glib far-right politicians who say their “preference” for native French citizens rather than the foreign-born is as simple as a wife’s preference for her husband.

In this atmosphere, “Quiet” follows three main story lines and the people in them, characters united by a frustrating sense of entrapment. These are people who want their lives to be better but whose options are inevitably limited, who don’t know how to escape a life where, as one of them says, “it’s always the same time, always the same beat.”

Guediguian has returned to the same performers repeatedly during his career, starting with the actress who is his wife as well as “Quiet’s” star, the gifted and versatile Ariane Ascaride. Her hair dyed blond for the role, Ascaride plays Michele, who does back-breaking labor at a fish market to keep her family solvent. With a husband who’s been reduced to a sad drunk by three years on the government dole, a daughter who sleeps around to support her heroine habit and an infant granddaughter, this is not a simple task. For help, Michele turns to the mysterious Gerard (Gerard Meylan), a former beau whose current situation is decidedly shadowy.

Also eventually associated with Michele is Paul (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a former dockworker who once knew “The Internationale” in four languages but now has turned his back on his union colleagues for a payout that enables him to put a down payment on a fancy taxi. Although he is close to his parents, loneliness is Paul’s main characteristic, a loneliness that seems to seep through his every pore.

Although she is married, Viviane (Christine Brucher), who teaches music to the disadvantaged, is lonely as well. She makes a connection with one of her former students, a young North African ex-con named Abderamane (Alexandre Ogou) who is troubled by prejudice no matter which race it springs from.

“The Town Is Quiet” perfectly captures the mood of a city where personal contact is tenuous and uncertain at best. It’s a film whose verite feeling places it indelibly in Marseille but is also able to make judicious use of outside influences, such as a pair of Janis Joplin soundtrack songs (“Summertime” and “Cry Baby”) that connect exquisitely with its despondent mood.

By its close, “The Town Is Quiet” has built to a more emotionally potent conclusion than even its strengths would have you imagine, despairing while holding out an unexpected kind of hope. If life does find a reason to go on, this exceptional film says, it’s on its own terms and no one else’s.

*

Unrated. Times guidelines: drug use, nudity, sexual situations, brutally adult subject matter.

‘The Town Is Quiet’

Ariane Ascaride...Michele

Gerard Meylan...Gerard

Jean-Pierre Darroussin...Paul

Christine Brucher...Viviane

Alexandre Ogou...Abderamane

Released by New Yorker Films. Director Robert Guediguian. Producer Robert Guediguian. Screenplay Jean-Louis Milesi, Robert Guediguian. Cinematographer Bernard Cavalie. Editor Bernard Sasia. Costumes Catherine Keller. Set design Michel Vandestien. Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes.

Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.