"Marius and Jeannette" is one of those movies that succeeds or falls flat depending on your response to the quirky characters screenwriters Robert Guediguian and Jean-Louis Milesi have cooked up. If you're easily charmed by stories featuring nutty folks playing Cupid for troubled lovers, you may find this French comedy enchanting. If eccentricity alone doesn't usually persuade you to buy a ticket, "Marius" is 102 missable minutes. The movie's saving grace is the luminous Ariane Ascaride, whose performance here may remind you of the legendary Anna Magnani. Like Magnani, Ascaride has an earthiness and warmth that makes her instantly endearing. Ascaride plays Jeannette, a mother of two who's had an inordinate amount of bad luck with men and is barely scraping by in the depressed city of Marseilles. When she tries to steal some paint from an abandoned cement factory in the hopes of sprucing up her house, Jeannette runs into guard Marius (Gerard Meylan) and before you can say "la vie en rose," a relationship is blooming. Not counting on Ascaride's charm to carry the film, director Guediguian keeps shifting away from the love story to introduce considerably less beguiling characters, most of whom seem like refugees from some European sitcom. Particularly disorienting is middle-aged Communist Caroline (Pascale Roberts): One minute, she's Sophie Zawistowska, dredging up memories of her imprisonment in a concentration camp, and the next she's Mrs. Roper, trying to put the make on an elderly beau. These lovable kooks, who spend all their considerable spare time hashing out left-wing politics, finally pool their resources to get Marius and Jeannette together. Neighbors like these would be a strong incentive for escaping the low-rent district and Guediguian's heavy-handedness as both writer and director doesn't make them any easier to stomach. Aside from Ascaride, the only flashes of interest in "Marius and Jeannette" are the film's observations about the French economy, in which a worker can slip down the ladder of success much more easily than he or she can ascend. The movie's strongest image is a tracking shot that follows Jeannette as she makes her way to the back of a seemingly endless line of job interviewees. That moment has a good deal more truth than anything else in this contrived tale. James Sanford
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