The Town is Quiet

Robert Guediguian's film offers up a cinematic roundelay of interlocking stories featuring characters from different social strata living in France's port city of Marseille, including a lower-class woman with a drug-addicted daughter and a husband who falls in with anti-immigration zealots; an ex-dock worker who borrows money from his stridently socialist father in order to buy a cab; a left-wing politician, his disenchanted wife, and a young African ex-con; and a bar owner who also proves to be a paid assassin. On the surface, The Town is Quiet seems to be a grim and complicated soap opera, but it's actually a political statement--a cinematic cry of despair over the rise of political parties on the far right in contemporary France, and the failure of the left to develop principled opposition to them. A linking device about a young Georgian boy who plays classical tunes on a keyboard in the park to raise money to buy a piano is meant to add a hopeful note regarding the possibility of cultural progress and assimilation, but it comes across as merely precious here. Although it serves up sporadically powerful moments, this is ultimately more successful as sociological argument than affecting drama. Optional. (F. Swietek)