Marcel and his chronicles In the cozy city of Marseille, summer reigns, the hot sun warms the land, air and the Gulf of Lyon, delighting citizens and tourists who came here to the resort or in pursuit of history. But even sunlight is not enough for those whose souls have lost the ability to produce salvific heat or to rejoice in nature. There are plenty of such people here, but everyone believes in their own chance to fix everything.
The average Madame Michele, for example, is optimistic about everything, not the example of family life. Fiona’s own daughter is a drug addict, her little granddaughter is in her arms and somewhere near her, a sullen and unemployed husband who has been living on benefits for three years. Michelle works for herself, her daughter and her granddaughter, vainly trying to create the illusion of luck. Fiona's chances of recovery disappear after another dose of drugs, and the relationship with her mother is eroded more and more, turning into a point of no return, symbolizing both the easiest and the most terrible way to maintain authorship.
Robert Gedigian is known for his habit of making his films exclusively in his native Marseille and with the corresponding simplicity and social openness to show the audience a rather sharp and rich portrait of the city and its inhabitants. The list of topics touched upon by the director directly or indirectly will be very long, despite the fact that the psychological and emotional aspects of the life of citizens are by no means less important for him than a detailed discussion of social and economic difficulties. Conflict often wanders around, and sometimes it should be searched for in the title.
The free and extensive storyline “Everything is calm in the city” is represented by several families far from each other. These people, who represent the proletarian part of the population of Marseille, can not be called a gray mass, and they will be reproached for low self-esteem. Dockers, for example, have been protesting against shipyard closures and wage delays, even though their situation is even more uncertain than the financial situation. Feeling this, one of the workers named Paul leaves the ranks of his former comrades and settles in a private office as a taxi driver, buying more than a decent Seat Toledo with accumulated money. And Paul can join the ranks of exemplary sons and caring men who can make even an unfamiliar woman laugh on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Like Michelle, for example. At the same time, somewhere on the other side of Marseille, a young African-French man named Abderraman, who has just been liberated from places not so distant, finds a music teacher, Vivian, who once worked with prisoners to thank her for her high moral character.
With the help of a deep but cautious humanism and elegant formalism, Gedigyan conceals a subtle irony. As if by chance, at the spectator level, Robert fixes the phrase about France’s loss of self-identification regarding the pan-European civilization, which he most clearly reveals through the image of François Mitterrand in Walking on the Field of Mars and places it almost next to the no less sacramental saying: “We like foreigners, but we prefer the French.” Why all these subtle anchors are needed in conditions of avoidance of the political theme in general, more or less only the final picture and its fatalistic justification, which for a long time gave way to the consciousness of the quick motives of Mozart’s “Turkish March” performed by the purest character, more or less clears up. And before that, the French-German-Armenian director will repeatedly make the audience feel a genuine sense of belonging, and most often this feeling will be very sad. The image of Fiona as a drug addict performed by Julie-Marie Parmentier will remain one of the most impressive for me personally, as well as the crystal of Abderraman’s soul, in which there is not a shadow of what you want to suspect him.
Having turned his native city into a whole microcosm with a set of universal themes for reflection, Gedigyan preferred to see those there whom he had tested for years of work. His favorites again became Ariane Ascarides, who played the dramatic role of Michelle, Jean-Pierre Darrussen as Paul and Gerard Melan. These three make up the backbone of the characters of the film, but in addition to them, Gedigyan chooses no less charismatic actors and actresses, and the short time allotted to their characters is more than paid off by the completeness and self-sufficiency of the images. Even the absence of prestigious awards and Gedigyan’s pathological craving for provocations do not deprive “Everything is Quiet in the City” of the dignity of being called a very difficult story about a passionate and not at all calm world embodied in only one, but surprisingly peculiar city.