Robert Guédiguian's Lady Jane (2008)

Mercifully, this film doesn't include the song of the same name by the Rolling Stones, and coming from a person of Robert Guédiguian's staunch left-wing reputation I'd have been surprised (and very disappointed) if if had. No, Lady Jane comes from a tatoo of a marijuana leaf, with that name underneath: 'Mary Jane' (an old-fashioned name for marijuana) would perhaps have been more appropriate, but no matter.

The difference between this film and other Marseilles-based films by Guédiguian is that – although this is as usual about pals together – it's essentially a film noir: the three pals are (mostly) killers. There are two flashbacks which clue us in on the past, before the three – Muriel (Ariane Ascaride), François (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and René (Gérard Meylan) felt obliged to go their separate ways. That was before the trio were into robbery (particularly fur coats), before Muriel killed a jeweller.

Now, Muriel has a boutique in Aix, François is in boat repair business, and René is a pimp with a striptease joint. They haven't met for years, until Muriel's son is kidnapped and a ransom demanded. So she meets her two former accomplices, they club together to pay the ransom, but that's not what was really wanted: the jeweller's young son had seen his father murdered (seeing the tatoo was the giveaway), and wanted Muriel to see what it feels like to have a loved one killed right in front of you.

In retaliation, the gang of course kidnap the former jeweller's son in turn, but already the trio has proved that violence merely begets violence, revenge is a one-way-street, so time for a rethink?

Robert Guédiguian's Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars | The Last Mitterrand (2005)

Robert Guédiguian moves away from the southern atmosphere of Marseilles, L'Estaque in particular, to make this wholly different feature in a sense of France in general. This film is an adaptation of Georges-Marc Benamou's novel Le Dernier Mitterrand, which of course gives it the English title. But in the original French version there is no direct mention of Mitterrand, although it is perfectly obvious that this is about the president's last days. Here, Mitterrand is wonderfully played by a seigneurial Michel Bouquet, and his (partly fictional) biographer Antoine Moreau by Jalil Lespert.

Although this is a film of two people, Antoine's personal life is understandably of little interest here. What matters is Mitterrand in the final weeks of his life. He has been president for fourteen years, the longest term of office that any French president has served. But what really matters here is not Mitterrand's politics, but a highly influential, highly educated and very well-read man in his final days.

We first see the man flying towards Chartres, making quotations from Péguy's 'Présentation de la Beauce à Notre Dame de Chartres', visiting the basilica in Saint Denis, and going to Brittany and Jarnac (where he was born and is buried). Locations don't necessarily make chronological sense, and nor do Mitterrand's quotations: from one viewpoint, this is a jigsaw, and Mitterrand isn't hagiographised by any means. He may try to tone down his claim that he's the last great French president and that after him only financiers and accountants will come (the end of history in other words), but he really means it.

Guédiguian himself tones down Mitterrand's involvement in Vichy, tones down Mitterrand's supreme hatred for (and at the same time role in) the destruction of communism. So what are we left with? An old man who's dying, needs help getting out of the bath by his biographer, and who has no good words about the presents he's received for his birthday.

So now he's gone – who, exactly – was Mitterrand?

Robert Guédiguian's Au fil d'Ariane (2014)

Au fil d'Ariane is initially described as 'une fantaisie'. Ariane (Ariane Ascaride) is preparing food on her birthday to get ready for the party, but although bunches of flowers arrive she keeps getting phone messages saying people – including her husband and children – won't be able to show up: in fact it looks like no one will. So she just decides to drive into town in her car: surely a crazy thing to do if she's drinking?

And then as she waits with others for the bridge to lower and the ship pass and everyone gets out of their cars and starts dancing to music someone's playing. She meets and gets talking to a motor-cyclist and goes off to a restaurant with him, but what happened to the car? At the restaurant she meets people such as Jack (Jacques Boudet) who pretends to be American, Marcial (Youssouf Djaoro) the souvenirs seller, and the owner Denis (Gérard Meylan), who's obssessed with Jean Ferrat.

But she seems to leave all too soon, and the taxi driver (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) takes her to the pound where her car's been put, but she can't pay to get her car back or pay the taxi driver as a thief comes along and takes her handbag. Out of reluctant charity the driver takes her back to the restaurant where the owner sets her on as a member of his staff. Marcial provides a boat for her to sleep in, and life is ecstatic: she loves talking to the restaurant tortoise, who even talks back to her in perfect French.

Then Ariane meets the taxi driver again, only he's turned into a suicidal actor – or is that part of the act? Certainly Ariane gets her wish to join in the act by singing on stage with the man with a rope round his neck, and the audience is so appreciative of her performance. And then she wakes up to see her husband (the taxi driver it seems) her children and all the other people we've seen in her dream.

This may not be one of Guédiguian's best films, but it's really refreshingly different from his others.

Robert Guédiguian's La Villa (2017)

Armand (Gérard Meylan), who runs a restaurant, and his brother Joseph (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a former teacher and worker, still live in the area of L'Estaque just outside Marseille, where their sister Angèle (Ariane Ascaride), a noted actor now living in Paris, has come to join the two as their father Maurice (Fred Ulysse) is ailing. It might well be, though, that he'll carry on for some time almost as a cabbage in the villa. Angèle hasn't visited for many years, partly because she's reminded of her own mortality, partly because her young daughter Blanche died there.

Joseph lives with his much younger girlfriend Bérangère (Anaïs Demoustier), whom he met at univeristy and whom she was once inspired by, although it's obvious that the relationship is now in its final phase, it's played out much like Joseph, and soon the doctor Yvan (Yann Trégouët) will probably take his place and the younger pair will leave for Paris. Yvan is visiting his parents Martin (Jacques Boudet) and Suzanne (Geneviève Mnich), although they too are exhausted. Exhausted by their son's charity, but most of all exhausted by age and their stockpiling of medecines will lead to their joint suicide. It seems as though life is ebbing away from the community.

Certainly prices are rising, globalisation is destroying the old way of life, younger people – those with touristic or property interests – are increasing. And soldiers patrol the beaches and callanques to scoop up immigrants to take to holding centres to ship back.

But Angèle, who at first sees the advances of the much younger Benjamin (Robinson Stévenin), a local fisherman who's besotted by her acting and her fame – as crazy, soon succumbs to the illusion of prolonging her youth by welcoming him sexually. This may suggest something maudlin if it weren't for the young immigrants, a group of three kids, one (Haylana Bechir) several years older than her brothers (Ayoub Oaued and Giani Roux). She's been acting as a substitute mother, stealing bird food Armand has left in the wild, and jam from the villa. With this she keeps herself and her brothers alive, having built a shelter from branches and old clothing. Another young brother didn't make it and she's covered him with stones.

In a style reminiscent of Michel and Marie-Claire (also played by Darroussin and Ascaride) taking in the young brothers in Les Neiges de Kilimandjaro, Joseph and Angèle take in the three children, making sure the ever-prowling soldiers don't spy them. Life continues – no matter in what way – but its precariousness is ever-present.

Robert Guédiguian's Les Neiges de Kilimandjaro | The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)

Michel Marteron (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is in his fifties, a welder and union representative for a company having difficulties and which has to shed twenty of its workers. Raoul (Gérard Meylan) is his brother-in-law, fellow worker and childhood friend who can't understand why Michel has unnecessarily included his name in the list of twenty: but Michel is a man of principal and doesn't believe that, as union representative, it should confer privileges on him. He draws his name out and joins the unemployed.

Michel's wife is Marie-Claire (Ariane Ascaride), a home help to the elderly who resigns herself to living with a 'hero', like Spiderman in the Strange comics her husband used to read as a child. Soon after, their thirtieth wedding anniversary is celebrated, with friends and relatives – the pair are grandparents – buying them plane tickets to Tanzania, home of course of Kilimanjaro. (Although Pascal Danel's 1966 song 'Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro' is played there, this film has no relationship to Henry King's 1952 film of the same name, and therefore no relationship to Hemingway's short story on which that film was based.) A substantial sum of money is also included: Michel's old-school politics and integrity are obviously appreciated in post-industrial L'Estaque.

Shortly after, armed robbers break into a belote session at Michel and Marie-Claire's with Raoul and his wife Denise (Marilyne Canto), taking credit cards and Michel's presents. In the scuffle, Michel's shoulder is dislocated and the act traumatises Denise. Via the old comic book that was taken in the robbery, Michel tracks the culprit down and the police arrest him: it's laid off young worker Christophe Brunet (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet).

Michel undergoes a process of self-examination: is he becoming one of the bougeoisie himself, relaxing on his pre-retirement pay, betraying his own former class? Marie-Claire points out that he's not really bourgeois. Christophe's gun turns out to be a toy and this is his first offence. Raoul doesn't want anything to do with retracting his complaint, and although Michel does, Christophe will still be tried and of course imprisoned.

With the money, Christophe – who has been looking after his fatherless younger brothers – has paid off the family's debts and bought food provisions: he is indeed in a far more precarious situation than Michel. The young brothers risk being claimed by the social services and Michel and Marie-Claire take them in temporarily: the ending is a happy reconciliation of everyone – perhaps a little too sentimental and unbelievable – but a point is being made here. Guédiguian is passionately concerned for the disappearing world of workers' friendship and solidarity, as opposed to the forces of global capitalism which incessantly strive to rule by dividing the working classes. Already, the comfortable retirement cushion that Michel and his generation are now benefitting from is being pulled out from beneath the grasp of younger generations.

Robert Guédiguian's Mon père est ingénienur | My Father Is an Engineer (2004)

Natacha (Ariane Ascaride) and Jérémie (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) (who also play Mary and Joseph here) are doctors: they met as adolescent communists in Marseille studying Russian – saying 'My father is an engineer' being difficult to pronounce for Jérémie – and they went their separate ways, Jérémie going international but Natacha staying in Marseille.

But when Jérémie returns to her mother (Pascale Roberts) and father (Jacques Boudet) Natacha is catatonic, and a major part of this film is spent in flashbacks over a long period, until we come to the racism of Natacha's married comrade Vadino (Gérard Meylan), who is distressed to the point of not inconsiderable violence at the thought of his fourteen-year-old daughter becoming emotionally involved with an Arab boy of the same age.

And then we see not the savage rape, but the effects of the rape by Vadino on Natacha, and we understand why she has become what she has become. Jérémie carries her in his arms, and perhaps we have a new beginning.

Robert Guédiguian's À l'attaque (2000)

This is another conte de l'Estaque. Guédiguian's film is in many ways a very different affair from his other films, and yet at the same time containing the same themes as so many of the other films: the absurdity and destruction of runaway capitalism, the strength of a small community, etc. And yet this is a crazy, impossible, almost post-modern script, a film within a film in which scenes are thrown away and recommenced at whim.

The flexibility is because in a sense we're really watching a film being made, which gives it an air of unreality: the characters are really puppets whose activities are being mapped out by two film makers: Yvan (Denis Podalydès) and Xavier (Jacques Pieller). This is to be a political film set in L'Estaque and based around Moliterno & Cie garage. And as they write the scenario various crazy ideas are thrown into the waste paper basket, such as the thought of key workers Jean-Do (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and Gigi (Gérard Maylan) being lured by sirens at the edge of a countryside road or singing words as in a Jacques Demy film but in a brothel in front of a host of scantily clad girls. And as this is a conte de l'Estaque the ending has of course to be optimistic, so we can't have Lola (Ariane Ascaride) being shot dead in the chest by the police at the end, or her father Moliterno (Jacques Boudet) shooting big boss Moreau (Pierre Banderet) through the head because he refuses to pay the family business the money it owes.

But – some twenty years after the advent of political correctness – we can still have a sex-starved Jean-Do ogling Lola and making sexist cracks all the time about how he drools over her. And when the end comes, we can have no police come to the garage as the workers hold Moreau captive until he signs the cheque for the money owing, have Lola wave it to the cheering crowd of villagers gathered below, and even have – cherry on the cake – Nells the banker (Alain Lenglet) steal the same sum not so much because he wants to save the firm as because he's in love with Lola.

And even, as the film fails to win the prize they hoped for, we have Xavier – previously puritanical about strong language – utter the last words to Yvan: 'Va te faire enculer !': 'Fuck off!' A sheer delight of a film.

Robert Guédiguian's À la place du cœur (1998)

An amateur review of Robert Guédiguian's À la place du cœur gave the title 'L'Amour en noir et blanc', and I can't find a better one. The first of Guédiguian's films based on a novel: the director went to New York to gain the rights to James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and although Kantcheff reveals that Guédiguian thought of calling this 'Si l'Estaque pouvait parler' ('If L'Estaque Could Talk'), Guédiguian thought that this didn't sound right: I don't think he bothered to say why.

Obviously Guédiguian's film adaptation of Baldwin's novel – set in Harlem with a title referring to a steet in Memphis and probably indirectly to W. C. Handy's 'Beale Street Blues' – would undergo some evolution when translated to fin-de-siècle Marseille: this is a largely white cast; the mother's trip is to Sarajevo rather than Puerto Rico; and the ending is upbeat.

Clim (Laure Raoust) is the daughter of Marianne (Arine Ascaride) and Joël (Jean-Pierre Darroussin, and has been the strong friend of the Bébé (Alex Ogou), who has been adopted by Francine (Christine Brücher) and Franck (Gérard Meylan), since childhood. Bébé is eighteen and Clim sixteen, they inevitably become lovers and want to marry, and Clim is pregnant. Despite their young age, and the fact that Bébé is only a hopeful sculptor, they have the consent of their respective parents: in fact the fathers do a drunken celebratory dance in a bar to Armstrong's version of 'Beale Street Blues'. In a later remininscent moment we return to the characters of Darrousssin and Ascaride in Ki lo sa ?, a film made fifteen years before, but where Joël here is made to think of his younger self unfurling a bed sheet to reveal a back view of a naked Ascaride (now seen as Marianne).

The upbeat ending comes when Bébé – imprisoned by a racist cop who has framed him by accusing him of rape – is saved by Marianne travelling to Sarajevo to get his accuser to drop the rape charge. The strength of family and friends once again prove to be of overwhelming importance in Guédiguian's world.

Robert Guédiguian's Marius et Jeannette (1997)

Marius et Jeannette is by far the most popular and well known of Robert Guédiguian's (at present) twenty-one films, obviously in part because it is essentially a love story – albeit not of young people – with an upbeat ending. There are no murders in this delightful and perhaps surprisingly humorous conte de l'Estaque, and the slowly emerging relationship of the two key players are set in the courtyard so familiar to Guédiguian and Meylan in their youth, along with the director's usual troupe of potes (mates) backing them up.

And as usual, the precariat* is foregrounded: Marius (Gérard Meylan) is a warden at a soon-to-be-demolished cement works, and has secured the job by pretending to have a leg injury. Jeannette (Ariane Ascaride) is struggling on her supermarket cashier's salary, supporting her two children by different partners, the young Malek (Miloud Nacer) and Magali (Laetitia Pesenti): Magali's father left them, and Malek's died. At first Jeannette has tried to 'steal' two abandoned tins of white paint from the works, and although Marius prevents her he later brings two tins to her home and even begins helping her to decorate: Jeannette initially seems more keen on him than he does her, although he eventually moves in with the approval of her son and daughter and her neighbours.

Her neighbours are Dédé (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and Caroline (Pascale Roberts), and Justin (Jacques Boudet) and Monique (Frédérique Bonnal). When Marius disappears Jeannette spies on him at the quarry, a former teetotal man glugging from a large bottle. It's down to Dédé and Justin to seek him out, get drunk with him, eke out his secret reluctance to face a new family after his wife and children have died in a car crash, but with almost comic book humour they drag the unconscious Marius to bed, 'strapping' him to the sleeping Jeannette with a sheet.

We first came across words by poet René Char – who lived in Provence and was buried in the family grave in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue – in a very different context in Ki lo sa ?, although in this film we see Marius reading a poem of Char's to Malek. We later learn that Malek became a teacher (professor? both French and American English words are ambiguous) of Arabic, and Magali becomes a journalist. The future takes on a rosy tint, even an international one as witnessed by the large plastic globe floating past a docked ship at the beginning of the film.

*Again, Guy Standing's term serves as a very useful tool to describe the characters.

Robert Guédiguian's À la vie, à la mort ! (1995)

À la vie, à la mort ! isn't a conte de l'Estaque, although seven years later it was to be the title of an album by Johnny Halliday: it is an expression of an eternal link between (usually two) people. But then, Guédiguian's films are peoplescapes, intimate links between a group of people who don't at all necessarily have to have genetic relationships. Joseph Mai's Robert Guédiguian (2017) includes an interesting comment on Guy Standing's book The Precariat (2011), which is a very useful way into Guédiguian's films, particularly À la vie, à la mort !: the precariat is a new class of people created by runaway capitalism, victims of the ruthless capitalist process, the laissés-pour-compte in a constant precarious financial situation worrying about where their money is coming from to pay the next bill.

À la vie, à la mort ! begins with a long sequence of a commercial district of a town which could be anywhere in the developed world, although I was strongly reminded of American malls, where end-of-history capitalism has taken over, where Wallmart is killing towns but is mercifully banned from New York City.

Outside the centre commercial in Marseille, clustering around a bar called Le Perroquet bleu, we have a motley group of members of the precariat: José (Gérard Meylan) who owns the bar, but is struggling to keep his head above water, particularly as his wife Josiane (Pascale Roberts, still young-looking but in her early sixties) is becoming embarrassed doing a striptease in front of her ageing customers; Patrick (Jacques Gamblin) is without a job and married to Marie-Sol (Ariane Ascaride) who works as a cleaner; and then there's Jaco (Jean-Pierre Daroussin), who's lost his job and and is becoming alcoholic. I could go on, but that's probably enough for a general picture.

Then Marie-Sol persuades a reluctant Jaco to have sex with her as she wants a child, José is having sex with young drug addict prostitute Vénus (Laetitia Pesenti) and Jaco starts to hit his wife, his two daughters hate him, and they leave him to his own devices.

Jaco literally ends up on the street, José is desperate to find a new stripper and Marie-Sol leaves her job because her boss is hitting on her sexually and we have a clear idea of the precariat. Then José sells his Merc to help things, but Patrick kills himself not because Marie-Sol is pregnant because she's cuckolded him but because he wants his insurance money to help his friends, and although this shows the strength of friendship rather than the family it's still pretty bleak, but brilliant.

Robert Guédiguian's L'Argent fait le bonheur (1992)

At the beginning of Joseph Mai's short analysis of L'Argent fait le bonheur in Robert Guédiguian, he says that his old friend, now television producer, Jean-Pierre Cottet, agreed to finance his next film if it was a kind of comedy with no deaths and an upbeat ending. After Guédiguian's last two films that may have seemed a tall order, although he teamed with Jean-Louis Milesi for the screenplay.

This is said to mark a turn in Guédiguian's film-making, not away from communism as such but away from any faith in policical party dogma, towards a neighbourhood group mentality. Here perhaps in particular, religion – often present in Guédiguian's other films as, along with communism, a signifier of love – is strongly present. This is Guéduian's first 'Conte de l'Estaque'.

Most of the film is shot in and around the HLMs of Plan d'Aou in L'Estaque, now much changed but in the film where le curé has his unconventional makeshift semi-circular corrugated iron church which is the place of wedding celebration as well as important discussions. Le curé, speaking in the present, turns directly to the audience with a gun in his hand which has just been handed in to him as no longer being of use, and tells us that the film we are about to see will go from bad and move to good. And we see le curé in the film trying to keep the peace in a familiar Guédiguiuian peoplescape in which the working classes have now been divided into thieving classes, drug-taking classes, neo-fascist classes, prostituting classes, internecine classes in which divide and rule appears to have been spectacularly acheived without even the visual presence of the dominant bourgeois class. Le curé picks up the used syringes in the morning and distributes new ones and condoms to those who ask for them.

Here, everyone knows each other, life is played out as much in the courtyard as inside the HLM flats, and the courtyard can play a very dramatic role. We meet Simona Viali (Ariane Ascaride), whose husband has died in a burglary, who makes a living selling stolen property and whose son steals her own property*; Muñoz (Géard Meylan), who used to burgle with her husband but is now a bank warden and a fascist; the communist Degros; the Muslim Amzoulah family; etc.

Near the beginning, a yellow line divided the HLM, a line beyond which the rival gangs are not allowed to cross. It takes the women hatching a plot in the church to bring the HLM into a community, the elderly overall-wearing beer-drinking men to dance with each other, the different races to join as one, the yellow dividing line to be rubbed out. Guédiguian's promise to Cottet was not broken, although this seems very much a fantasy than a reality: and can it really be that the ununiformed curé has now got together with Simona?

*Guédiguian sometimes has a tendency to see friendship as a stronger bond than the family.

Robert Guédiguian's Dieu vomit les tiédes (1989)

Under different names to the previous Ki lo sa ?, which ended in all four spiritually lost characters being poisoned, Dieu vomit les tiédes shows us the same actors – Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Cochise), Ariane Ascaride (Tirelire), Gérard Meylan (Frisé) and Pierre Banderet (Quatre-Œil). This film is set in Martigues as opposed to the usual L'Estqaue/Riaux, and we see a great deal of the Viaduc de Caronte. Cochise is a successful writer in Paris, although he tells his editor at the beginning of the film that he's not finishing his work on the French Revolution, people no longer give a shit, and he promptly leaves in a drunken state, leaves his wife too and returns to his childhood home where he made a blood pact with the other three main characters. But like him, things have changed. Tirelire works in a restaurant and jollies the folk up in a home with her songs and starts up a relationship up with Cochise, who's staying with his mother who treats him like a long-lost child. Quatre-Œil is an editor for a small circulation paper and also seems to have lost his ideals as a child. But Frisé, whose hair is now straight, leads a kind of bohemian existence living in a shack by the viaduct, painting it repeatedly and giving the local kids things to do like play table tennis or a musical instrument, but shoos them all away when he finds a syringe on one of them: post-industrial life doesn't have the same spirit as when he was young, there's more despair and indifference, a general lack of working-class solidarity.

And what working class? In Robert Guédiguian : cinéaste (2013), Christophe Kantcheff points to Gilbert (Gérard Meylan) showing the very first image of Guédigian's, one of the last working-class heroes as the cement factories are closing and with them a whole way of life. Joseph Mai, in his book Robert Guédiguian (2017) in Manchester Unversity Press's French Film Directors series, tells us that Philip Anderson, in an article in The Australian Journal of French Studies, has traced a background television sequence to a quotation from Pasolini's 'Genocide', first published as an article in his newspaper column for Corriere della Sera between 1972 and 1975 and collected in a volume as Scritti corsari (1975). The 'genocide' is of the working class by the bourgeoisie, who have now found far more subtle methods of assimilation than direct violence, such as television. This made me wonder why no one ever mentions Marcuse these days, a man who spoke a great deal about the way capitalism absorbs its discontents. Things are fractured, and the bi-centential festivities of the French revolution seem lukewarm, and the presence of the extreme right-wing now is menacing.

Then drownings happen, bodies washed up: there's a usurer, a pimp, a fascist, and so on. Frisé confesses towards the end that he's responsible for this: he can escape with impunity, they deserved it. Cochise thinks he's mad, and the film ends with the dead Frisé lying across Cochise, who can't extricate himself. Realistically improbable, but symbolically significant in that Cochise is stuck mentally, having no place ot move.

Robert Guédiguian's Ki lo sa ? (1985)

Robert Guédiguian returns to the present, and here we have four childhood friends who, among a number of others who don't turn up, have agreed to meet at the same place after ten years. Again, the viewer has to suspend disbelief as these people are surely at the very least into their thirties, and so would hardly have been kids ten years before? But then, this is where Guédiguian's contempt for realism comes in: it doesn't matter. So, we have Dada (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) as host to any comers to the place where he is both gardener and cook, with absentee landlords. But only Marie (Ariane Ascaride), Gitan (Gérard Meylan) and Pierrot (Pierre Banderet) turn up. They stay the night but the following day is different and difficult.

Marie leaves as she has a 'date', Pierrot leaves with her, but Gitan stays to help Dada with the gardening, and Dada says he can stay as long as he likes. But gradually we're introduced to complications, to the despair of all four, and Marie returns without meeting her 'date', as does Pierrot, and Gitan just drinks. All of them seem to be desperate: Dada, hopelessly, loves Marie, who as a profession sells her body to men; Gitan, as his name suggests, is a tramp; and Pierrot writes wonderful words which Gitan exposes as copies of René Clar's words to Breton. Gitan is leaving but Dada implores him to take a coffee, which he does with the three others, and they all die poisoned. Shortly following this a large group of children climb over the wall and invade the garden, playing with the dead: are they from the four people's past or their own future?

Robert Guédiguian's Rouge midi (1984)

Guédiguian wished he'd made this film first rather than Dernier Été for its more autobiographical element, although I can't see that it matters. But I had to watch this film twice to get the hang of what was happening, although that's partly my fault as I've always had problems with relatives and different generations. All the same, Guédiguian has a casual, no, nonchalant approach to realism, which is one respect where he differs from being a Ken Loach from the south of France: he's not too fussed about people not looking about forty years older than they're supposed to be, and as for grandfathers re-appearing as their grandsons, well who cares? Frankly, not me when I get the idea of what's going on.

This is said to be the story of three generations, and I suppose it is if you discount the present one. So the great-grandfather arrives from Italy in L'Éstaque with his family, but watch out for generational advances. The daughter Maggiorina (Ariane Ascaride) is quickly wooed by Jérôme (Gérard Meylan), who may have the odd dalliance but remains with his wife. Their son Pierre (Pierre Pradinas) will marry Céline (Frédérique Bonnal), and a scene before that will show them in a post-coital position in the countryside, Pierre foregrounded with his leg raised to conceal both his and his girlfriend's genitals.

Pierre and Céline's son Sauveur (Adbel Ali Sid) grows up and is forced to tell his aged grandmother Maggiorina (with a wrinkle-free neck) that her husband Jérôme has died, and Sauveur (now in the unlikely shape of Meylan) looks back on it all and leaves Marseilles at St Charles on the SNCF for, say, Paris? I loved the film, but did I get it all right?

Robert Guédiguian and Frank Le Wita's Dernier Été (1980)

This is Robert Guédiguian's first film, co-directed with Frank Le Wita, is as so often set in the working-class area L'Estaque and Riaux to the north-west of Marseille, and at a time when the factories are closing down. Gilbert (Gérard Meylan) is the first man to be seen, emerging in overalls with a visor and a soldering iron. In his book Robert Guédiguian : cinéaste (2013), Christophe Kantcheff notes that the film came out in the same year as John Lennon died, the singer of 'Working Class Hero', and continues by saying that the film shares the same statement that Lennon closed his first post-Beatles album with: 'The dream is over.' Gilbert knows that he will not live as his parents have, and that his and his friends' future is uncertain. At first he'll have to made his living at any odd job he can find, and join in the petty crimes of his friends.

Also prominent in this film are the married (therefore compromised) van driver Mario (Jean-Pierre Moreno), Banane (Djamal Bouanane), Le Muet (Malek Hamzaoui), and Guédiguian's wife Ariane Ascaride (here playing Josiane, soon to become Gilbert's girlfriend. The atmosphere is very masculine, with violence always close to the surface, with such activities as breaking into cars and driving off with them, stealing the radios, and running out of a bar or restaurant without paying.

Gilbert and Banane get caught robbing a house and Gilbert is shot dead in the back: his last summer.

Robert Guédiguian's La Ville est Tranquille | The Town Is Quiet (2015)

Although I've only seen Robert Guédiguian's Le Promeneur du Champs-de-Mars, which is untypical of many of his twenty-one films, Christophe Kanchieff's book on the film director and his film's prepared me very well for what I was about to see. I think though that, although I personally loved the film, some appear to think it's his most bleak.

Well, Michèle (Ariane Ascaride) slaves away in the fish trade, her husband is an out-of-work alcoholic uninterested in the family, her daughter Fiona (Julie-Marie Parmentier) is a heroin addict with a young daughter and an absent father and prostitutes herself for three hundred francs for anyone who'll have her. And all this is set against the dockers' unrest, traditional political allegiances no longer applying with the working class voting for extreme right-wing racist parties, and so on. Even the parents of Paul (Jean-Pierre Daroussan) don't think they'll vote again, and don't blame their ex-docker son for forking out 3500 francs a month on payments for his taxi, the traitor.

And things get worse as Michèle realises prescribed medicines won't work for Fiona, who has no faith in methadone, and after taking a drug cocktail nearly dies until Ariane bundles her into the shower to come to. The small community of L'Estaque north-east of Marseille is full of little kindnesses, such as Paul filling Michèle's small moped tank so she can get to work, and even giving her three hundred francs free of change when he sees her hustling for custom among the taxi rank. But Paul returns to Michèle for sex as he's fallen for her, although he pays Michèle for the service, a woman hitherto completely faithful to her husband. Meanwhile, Michèle returns to her childhood lover Gérard (Gérard Maylan), who indirectly caused her to have a very bloody abortion: she's got the money to pay for Fiona's farine (smack). And then Paul takes taxi fares out of his permitted hours and loses his licence, thus forcing him to take illegal fares from unsuspecting strangers at the airport.

It can only end in tragedy: Michèle is at her wits end because she can no longer find the money for Fiona'a habit so she gives her a lethal dose and Gérard helps her to make it look like suicide. Then Gérard reveals his despair by shooting his skull off in the street: he's a hired killer as well as a bar owner. And that's without even mentioning other things.

However, the film ends of an upnote: young Sarkis, the enthusiastic piano player, gets his wish for a grand piano and plays in the narrow street to an appreciative audience.

Christophe Kantcheff: Robert Guédiguian: Cinéaste (2013)

Christophe Kantcheff's Robert Guédiguian is a suberb, lavish 270-page book with many photos by Jérôme Cabanel. Initially this could be seen as a coffee-table publication, although it's far more informed and worthy than most of that category of books. Here are described the various films that Guédiguian (sometimes not ignorantly called the French Ken Loach, who is certainly an influence) directed up to the date of publication, and even a brief mention of two that were in the pipeline: Le Fil d'Ariane (2014) and Une historie de fou (2015).

Guédiguian was born in L'Estaque to the north-west of Marseille, has an accent from the area (I learned from watching an interview on On n'est pas couché), and sets the vast majority of his films either in L'Estaque or the Marseille area. He has his own cooperative company Agat Films and very often his wife Ariane Ascarid and his friends Gérard Méylan and Jean-Pierre Darroussan take lead parts in his films: in fact, the regular viewer has watched them age in the thirty years Guédiguian has been filming.

As a former communist and still to quite far to the left of centre, Guédiguian's films are engagés, often dealing with the problems caused by the post-industrialisation of society: poverty, unemployment, prostitution as a way to makes ends meet, drugs, globalisation in general, gentrification, divide and rule, etc.

In spite of the high quality of his films, Guédiguian is not a high-ranking film maker, his name doesn't easily trip off the tongue of many French speakers as other directors do, and the only film so far to reach audiences of a few million was Marius et Jeannette (1997).

Kantcheff's book covers not only the films separately and at the same time makes comparisons of them collectively, but looks at the role of women as opposed to men in Guédiguian's films, the role of children, the use of nudity, the transmission of knowledge, etc. There are also interviews with the main characters. This is a must for anyone who enjoys good cinema.