This movie is for those who want to believe that life can be pleasant even if one is a broke divorced unemployed mother of two without prospects as long as one believes. In this case the requisite belief is not in god or in life everlasting but in love & some communitarian evolution of romanticized communism. Our once deserted and once widowed unemployed heroine finds love amongst the deconstructing ruins of a cement factory with its emotionally and "physically" crippled security guard. The film is not unrelieved tendentious reality though the only action is a rather bloody bar room brawl from which the protagonists escape drunk but without injury. The one great myth that deserves debunking is that a dozen people in a third of a dozen seperate households can live cheek by jowl in a fading tenement, sharing all intimacies and still like each other. I was somewhat mean in giving it a 6 but it sure isn't worth the 8.7 average rating that prompted me to see it. The French must have different eyes.
Review of Marius and Jeannette
