The Town Is Quiet

Marseille at the turn of the two thousands. The city is in crisis: no work, drugs, neighbourhoods closed off from one another. A woman who works in the fish market gets up before dawn, goes home and looks after her addicted daughter and her grandchild. In other corners of the city a bartender and several other lives are making their own calculations. Robert Guédiguian's film is the darkest of the works he has made about his own city. The telling builds no single hero; lives touch, cross and mostly get worse. The film neither prettifies poverty nor asks for pity; it shows the causes. Ariane Ascaride takes the lead. It was made in 2000 and records the side of Marseille that is not for tourists.