Marie-Jo and Her Two Lovers

Synopsis: Marie-Jo (Ariane Ascaride) loves her husband Daniel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) but also has a lover, Marco (Gerard Meylan), with whom she equally in love. Her feelings of guilt are exacerbated when Daniel finds out about her affair. She decides that she must choose but that only increases the pain for everyone involved.

Robert Guédiguian’s film might be described as a form of art realism, eschewing the typically politicized position of his other films such as his previous effort, La Ville Est Tranquille, to tell  a more personal story.  As usual, the location is Marseilles, and his characters are ordinary working joes. Also as usual, his wife, Ariane Ascaride, appears in the lead role supported by other players from the director's stock company.

Marie-Jo and Her Two Lovers is a love story about and for middle-aged people who have been through the mill more than once and who still have bills to pay and jobs to go to. It is about the joy that love brings, the way that it appears like a rainbow in the grey landscape of the everyday, but it is also about the way it destroys the security and dependability that goes with that same everyday. In this respect it is entirely believable (Guédiguian co-wrote with Jean-Louis Milesi) with convincing performances from the three principals. Jean-Pierre Darroussin is terrific as the cuckolded husband and Ascaride, well-accustomed to portraying Guediguian’s tragic sense of life, is fully up to portraying the torn-between-two lovers Marie-Jo. Unfortunately its strengths as realism are offset by an overdose of artistic indulgence, Guédiguian overloading the film with reiterative scenes featuring the principals either in their underwear or nude and lingering close ups of either reflectively smiling or tear-stained faces to make sure that we understand that we are witnessing the real joys and sorrows of the characters.  By the time he underscores such with Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World" it all starts to become rather unfortunately bathetic.

The film opens with a very French scene, a family picnic au bord de la mer. It is however, clear that there is a darker current flowing beneath the sunlit blue. The sea reappears as a motif throughout the film. In a large part, simply because Marseilles is a sea-port and the sea is a fundamental part of daily life (one can almost taste the salt air thanks to Renato Berta’s excellent camerawork). Because of this pragmatic aspect I was not prepared for the role it plays in the resolution of Marie-Jo’s story, one which some may find it a little contrived although it does have a striking poetic efficacy.

Although it would have benefitted from more rigorous editing, fans of Guédiguian and anyone with a taste for a well-written, well-performed drama of the (middle-aged) heart will be well-satisfied.

 

 

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