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Fans of "Marius et Jeanette" and "脌 la place du coeur" will need no introduction to the work of Robert Gu茅diguian, whose films combine an offbeat and whimsical sensibility with a heartfelt concern for society's underdogs. But even if you are unfamiliar with the French director's oeuvre, you will find much to enjoy in this story of ordinary folk battling to survive against the odds.
As in previous Gu茅diguian films, the action centres on the working class people of the Estaque region of Marseilles, an area immortalised a hundred years ago by C茅zanne but now beset by political and economic uncertainty. The plot revolves around the employees of a local garage, who are forced to take matters into their own hands when a bad debt leads the bank to foreclose on the mortgage.
Setting the family-run business against a multinational whose callousness and cynicism threatens to send it spiralling into bankruptcy, Gu茅diguian and his co-writer Jean-Louis Milesi fashion a contemporary fable which laces its romantic and comic elements with a liberal dose of righteous indignation. At the same time, they make fun of the film-making process by incorporating a framing narrative showing two scriptwriters trying to create a movie that is both crowd-pleasing and socially relevant.
Thus every ill-conceived notion, red herring, and blind alley is acted out before they reach one of several possible conclusions. It's a clever if distracting device, but one that at least adds some leavening humour to what could easily have been a stale didactic exercise.
