Marie-Jo et ses 2 amours

Robert Guédiguian has created a world out of some parts of Marseille that I feel very comfortable in. His stock company of Ariane Ascaride, Gérard Meylan and Jean-Pierre Darroussin have made many films with him, and are at ease with his practices. If Darroussin's character is perhaps a little too eager to go along with his wife's infidelity, the richness of the narrative makes us pardon this flaw.

The film does have a very slow action which will make some viewers impatient. It takes a long time for Marie-Jo to leave Daniel and go off to Marco's house, and she has trouble at work (she drives disabled people to their doctor and back) that isn't fully examined. Ariane Ascaride's performance is fully equal to the demands made on her, and made me think more than once of Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut's masterpiece, a similar situation of a woman having to choose between two men and failing to do it.

I found this film easy to watch (as might a lot of males given the amount of skin shown on the screen) because as well as the plot which is apparent from the title of the film, it gives a great feeling of what the ordinary parts of Marseille are like. It's like walking or driving around in the city. One of Marie-Jo's lovers is a builder, the other a ship pilot. We see what their lives entail, and how she complicates them. It's interesting to see a woman nearly 50 years old carrying off a sexually-charged role with such self-assuredness. One can't imagine this happening in a Hollywood movie like this. It also refuses to take a moral tone on what she is doing, and overall the action seems more matter-of-fact than melodramatic. Whether you see this as realistic or boring depends on your expectations of this sort of film. To me, it seemed realistic, at least for the French, and it more or less kept me guessing how or if things would be resolved, right up to the rather odd conclusion. I found this was the most unsatisfactory part of the film, mainly because it was hard to see why things happened the way they did, it almost looking like the ending was tacked on merely to put some sort of conclusion to the film. Overall I quite liked it, for showing that ordinariness can still be interesting, and that everyone has to decide on morality for themselves.

Marie-Jo is a woman who lives a perfect and happy couple's life with his husband, Daniel, and his daughter Julie. Daniel has a small building company and Marie-Jo works as ambulance driver. But Marie-Jo also loves Marco, a pilot of Marseille's harbour. Equally loving the two men, Marie-Jo shall face a very difficult situation and she lives this double love as a curse in spite of happiness that she has with it. She particularly suffers to be lying to her husband and not be able to share his love for Marco with him. One day, she makes a choice and goes away from his house to live with Marco. But, she can't accept the distress she has herself given to her husband and, after some days, she returns home. Nevertheless, Marie-Jo will return once a time with Marco and that will be the cause of the final drama. During a sea excursion aboard their boat, Marco and Marie-Jo will die by drowning. Suicide or accident? The movie perhaps a little too long is valuable by the actors' performance in this tragic love story, the sensibility of the telling of this adultery situation, the well-painted ambiance of human relationship in this Marseille district called "L'Estaque" and the magnificent Renato Berta's cinematography.

When I watch this film, and some others from Robert Guediguian's team, crew: Jean-PierreDarroussin, Ariana Ascaride, Gerad Meylan, I can't prevent myself to think about Romy Schneider, Michel Piccoli, Yves Montand,....and Claude Sautet's films. More than Marcel Pagnol's style for sure, despite the South of France's settings. The magic way those two directors (Sautet and Guediguian) have to describe those characters relationship in bitter but so beautiful, poignant, moving dramas. It is so simple, brilliant, intelligent, because most of audiences can recognize themselves in those portraits. So human, so sensitive. The technicalities in term of pure directing are of course a bit different. And Marseilles is also a character in most of Robert Guédiguian's films. Pure delight despite the bitter taste in the mouth after watching. Don't confound with François Truffaut's JULES ET JIM, because of the scheme of a woman in love with two men. Or Oliver Stone's SAVAGES.

If Marie-Jo doesn't quite have it all she has a reasonable facsimile; happily married in her mid forties, still having great and regular six with her self-employed builder husband, for whom she does the accounts and who is as devoted to her as she is to him. A non-demanding job on the side ferrying patients to and from hospital appointments, a nice, well-appointed house, a gifted and bright daughter studying Law and herself in a stable and loving relationship. What more could she want? Well, nothing ... on paper. So why, given all these assets, can't she stop, after a 12 month clandestine affair, seeing Marco, a harbor pilot, who she loves as deeply as she does Daniel, her husband, and with whom she has equally great and equally regular sex. Welcome to the Marseilles of Marseilles-born Robert Guediguian, where nothing happens ... all at once. This guy has created and developed his own repertory company and, like that other great regional specialist Marcel Pagnol, returns again and again to his roots but not to flaunt the tourist side of Marseilles (as filmmakers are wont to do with Paris), merely to show the soft underbelly. His real-life partner Ariane Ascaride has never been more beguiling than she is here and the movie is punctuated by Ascaride smiles that light up the screen and, for the time you are watching, rival those of Hepburn (BOTH Hepburns actually) and Audrey (Amalie) Tatou. Once again she is more than ably supported by Guediguian stalwarts Jean-Pierre Darroussin (who may have it written into his contract that he gets to dance every time he goes to bat - catch him in 'Un air de famille' and you'll see what I mean) as Daniel and Gerard Meylan (the Marius of 'Marius et Jeanette') as Marco the pilot. Mid-life crises are not new, neither are mid-life affairs, but whereas the couple in 'Brief Encounter' were terribly well-behaved and kept a stiff-upper lip whilst enduring the torment of middle-aged longing, the French menage a trois here let it all hang out. The problem is that given the way Guediguian has elected to go with this story there's no real way to resolve it without upsetting some element of the audience.Brushing that aside this is a great movie, by turns lyrical, happy and heartbreaking. The three leads are outstanding but Neil Simon it isn't. Rating : Four and one half stars going away.