Véronique Balme
A man in his mid 30's reevaluates his life and priorities after he met someone from his past.
Hubert is a French policeman with very sharp methods. After being forced to take 2 months off by his boss, who doesn't share his view on working methods, he goes back to Japan, where he used to work 19 years ago, to settle the probate of his girlfriend who left him shortly after marriage without a trace.
In this French drama, a teenager falls into a life of crime, little realizing the consequences. S. is a moody young man who loses his job at a bakery, and decides to throw in his lot with a group of thieves about the same age as himself. S. and his cronies are strictly small-timers, pulling off second-rate break-ins for an older crime boss, but his willingness to do what he's told helps him rise up the ladder to bigger and more lucrative jobs. However, S. lacks the maturity or experience to deal with the risks, and after a few disastrous mistakes, he finds his fortunes sinking far faster than they rose.
From the director of Marius et Jeannette, this story of two working-class families is a fable with an optimist streak. A young black man, Francois, is wrongly accused of rape by a racist policeman. The story is told in voiceover by his childhood friend, neighbor, and the mother of his future child, Clementine, who is white. The city is Marseilles as in the previous film, symbolic with its churches, prisons and ruins. Except in this film, director Robert Guediguian also ventures outside, taking the story to Sarajevo; two different cities, one devastated by war, the other by a bad economy and unemployment. A la Place du coeur won a Special Jury Prize at the 1998 San Sebastian Film Festival and was also shown at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival and the 1998 Montreal Film Festival.
