The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Michel is a docker and a union man. A list of redundancies at the plant is to be drawn by lot and Michel puts his own name in the draw; his own name comes out. He is out of work but he has his settlement, a house, grandchildren. His friends collect money to send him and his wife to Kilimanjaro. One evening as they sit at home two masked men come in, tie them up, and take the money and the cards. The police catch one. Michel knows the boy; he is one of the young men let go from the same plant. Then he learns something else: the boy has two small brothers to look after. Robert Guédiguian directs. Jean-Pierre Darroussin plays Michel and Ariane Ascaride his wife Marie-Claire; Gérard Meylan is in the cast. It is a French production and is set in the l'Estaque district of Marseille. The film's starting point is Victor Hugo's poem about a poor fishing family. It screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. The director has made his films in the same district with the same actors for years; Ascaride and Darroussin are the fixed names of that company. The matter it treats is the limit of solidarity; Michel defends his own values, and what happens when those values run against his own interest is left open. The narrative does not justify the thief either; the boy is angry and unrepentant. It takes on the difference between generations; the old unionism and today's poverty do not speak the same language. Its limit is method; the narrative turns around a moral question and the resolution is too hopeful. Who it is for: viewers who like French social drama and Guédiguian's cinema. Who it is not for: it is slow, the argument explicit, and the ending too tidy.