Suddenly a terrible smash

On Nov. 5, 2018, the collapse of two buildings in Marseille left eight people dead, triggering a wave of solidarity: in just a few days, two demonstrations have put urban planning policies on trial. Since this event blanket evacuations to prevent more deaths. There are more than 40,000 buildings declared in a state of disrepair, despite which the collapses have continued.

It started with Rue D'Aubagne, right in the center from where they want to kick out residents to make it a tourist area, thus neglecting a policy of investment and renovation.

Around the collective Nov. 5 revolves the movement aimed at the direction to be given to the post-crisis management phase.

Rosa along with her children, brother and friends are a family of Armenian descent who have been fighting for solidarity, for the migrant detention center, and for a policy that takes care of public health for years.

Named after Rosa Luxemburg and her love for tits, a bird that symbolizes freedom and hope, she works at the hospital and her acquaintances would like her to run in the municipal elections, and she unconvinced, however, argues that it takes three things to win: the program, the program and the program.

Her communist cab driver brother is named Antonio after Gramsci.

Son Sarkis, a medical graduate, runs a family bar, is in love with Alice and would like nine children.

The latter's father, Henri, has sold his bookstore to employees who have formed a cooperative while Rosa's other son, married with offspring would like to leave to fight in Nagorno Karabakh and defend the Armenian cause.

And while Aznavour sings that "misery would be less hostile with sunshine," communists no longer exist and the Greens should be persuaded to end capitalism, yet the factor that emerges from the barroom speeches Sarkis hears every day is that extreme individualism leads nowhere.

No one says that Marseilles was founded by Armenians : a decent city where there are no bourgeois, no racists and no fascists where "you need to act in your neighborhood and think with the world."

Alice has to convince the town with a speech that is persuasive because she

works with the people not do reactionary crap.

For Antony the TV offers more and more channels and less and less choice, for Henri if you have a good book with you time and space do not exist and if to change the world you have to be eager yet he espouses the stoic cause: have no fear, have no hope.

If the tragedy of our time is that the fools lead the blind, one must be inspired by Homer's bust in the center of the square because blindness had sharpened his memory and other senses.

It is necessary to call the square November 5 precisely because of memory and to explain one day what happened.

Rhetorical, nostalgic, effective, Guédiguian returns to his Marseilles through the material collapse of buildings, a metaphor for the fall of dreams, utopias, and socialism in which he nevertheless does not stop believing and representing.

Despite the disillusions and mediocrity of the present, he continues the celebration of struggle and the love of nostalgic, romantic and ideological comedy.

Guediguan is Guediguan, recognizable, comfortable, sharp, analytical, coherent; a vision on which to reflect, to be moved, to be entertained, and to be political.

The last words invite one to embark for Kythera, the remote island that contends with Cyprus for the birth of Venus and requires strong determination to reach it.... An opening and final metaphor accompanies a film that is simple and proletarian, social and popular, a socio/political/economic journey, a safe harbor to a cinema now on the verge of extinction.

To paraphrase T.W. Adorno, a cinema that observes nihilism, "stands up to it, and in the irreducible consciousness of negativity, holds out the possibility of the best," because "it is worth mistrusting everything that is light and carefree, everything that lets go and implies indulgence toward the overbearingness of the existing."

05-Apr-2024 by Beatrice