Something's happening in French cinema. Great film-makers seem to be crawling from the woodwork. Erick Zonca's La Vie Revee des Anges and Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jesus last year were clear indications that the new generation of French filmmakers was looking back past the nouvelle vague and the Americanisation of Gallic film to their own indigenous cinema tradition, trading off and inspired by masters like Renoir, Ophuls and Bresson. And so it is with Marseille-based Robert Guediguian.
The story of a mixed-race love affair set among the working-class Marseille community may not, on the face of it, seem to yield much in the way of life-enhancing material. Yet Guediguian's follow-up to Marius et Jeanette is a jewel of cinema d'humanite, easily standing alongside the best of Ken Loach's work. Based on James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, the film tells the story of the love developed from childhood between young Clim (Laure Raoust) and Bebe (Alexandre Ogou).
At the outset, Bebe, an 18-year-old black man, is in prison on a rape charge, having been stitched up by a racist cop and the traumatised victim, who has returned to Sarajevo. Sixteen-year-old Clim visits him in jail to tell him she is pregnant. Between her and her family and Bebe's foster family, there is a concerted effort to get the verdict overturned.
The occasional flashback to Clim and Bebe's first encounter, when as a precocious six-year-old she scratches his arm with a rusty nail during a childhood fight, creates a sense of life and character that is sensitive and wholly authentic. The growing friendship between Clim's father Joel (Jean-Pierre Darrousin) and Bebe's adoptive father Franck (Gerard Meylan), bonded through the mutual respect of the working man and the relationship of their children, is quite unbelievably moving. The journey made by Clim's mother Marianne (Ariane Ascaride) to Sarajevo to locate the victim and persuade her that she has made a mistake in identification is a subtle shift of perspective, broadening the film's underlying themes; and the conclusion is uplifting, joyful and immensely poignant.
"We must take care of each other" acts as a refrain throughout the film - a thematic litany that the families (in the manner of Timothy Spall's father in Secrets and Lies) adhere to in order to survive life's vicissitudes.
The most remarkable aspect of the film is Guediguian's facility to extract resonant images from unexpected places: Franck sitting outdoors peeling apricots for a pie, the cramped apartments where families sit around discussing the future; the working-man's cafe where Franck and Joel dance drunkenly in celebration of the imminent marriage of their children and a new life. Suffused with a warmth and unanticipated beauty, fuelled by character studies of tremendous dignity and affecting depth, this is that rare thing: a film about life that is devoid of all pretensions and pompousness. It restores one's faith not just in film, but in life itself.
A La Place Du Coeur
Cert: 15
