Robert Guédiguian’s social drama “Gloria Mundi” loses sight of social reality through plot clichés.
One would think that if social inequality rises, at least social cinema will flourish, but the opposite is the case. Just like German cinema, French cinema usually takes place in the middle class, even if it likes to address class differences – mostly in the conciliatory tone of “pretty best friends”. Often it is filmmakers with a migration background who even address social hardship and ideally – like Ladj Ly in his masterful drama “Die Wütenden” – even expand the film language.
Robert Guédiguian cannot be accused of this. For more than four decades, the director of “Marius and Jeanette – A Love in Marseille” has been narrating working class dramas. The distributor, which subtitled its film “Gloria Mundi”, would like to commemorate this success of 1997, “Return to Marseille”. But who actually left there? Certainly not Guédiguian, who repeatedly stages his city and its people in new ways. And the faces that recur in his work are also unlikely to be unfaithful to Marseille for long.
Gérard Meylan and Ariane Ascaride, the pair of actors from “Marius and Jeanette”, now plays Daniel and Sylvia, an ex-prisoner and his ex-wife. Their daughter Mathilda (Anaïs Demoustier) only saw Daniel grow up when he was visiting. No wonder that the young mother of a baby with the symbolic name Gloria has little interest in honoring the homecomer with the role of grandfather. Soon, however, he will not only make himself indispensable in looking after the baby. However, little pulls him back to life.
Sylvie has a kind-hearted husband, a bus driver, who visibly suffers from the still noticeable vibrations between the ex-couple. Most of all, Daniel would like to say goodbye back to the kitchen with a solid heroic deed. He owed his served sentence to the unsuccessful defense of a friend, in which several attackers lost their lives. In fact, the depressing circumstances in which he now experiences his daughter literally call for some form of heroism. At least the way Guédiguian designed his fatalistic social drama.
For the young couple struggling to survive, misfortune seldom comes alone. While the mother struggles with no prospect of a permanent job, her loving husband hires out a limousine leased beyond the means as an Uber chauffeur. When he is beaten up by competing taxi drivers, he can no longer take care of the family.
Mathilda sees her sister’s husband as having a chance of social advancement. The inconsiderate young entrepreneur lives with his second-hand and electronics store, as someone once criticized him, from the poverty of others. Both have an affair, but Mathilda immediately blows up when a promised job as managing director goes to his second lover. Difficult for the men who are close to Mathilda, as not to commit delinquents in order to save their honor.
Archaischer Fatalismus
One would like to say that the exploitative social conditions that Guédiguian so carefully outlined led straight to violence – in a subplot, Mathilda’s mother had to quarrel with a privileged trade unionist because she could not afford to strike. In fact, however, it is only his script, written with Serge Valletti, which, like in a DW Griffith silent film, sees material and emotional brutality in close connection. In an almost archaic fatalism, what happened to Mathilda’s mother after the husband’s imprisonment must repeat itself in the younger generation. Her prostitution out of poverty is related to Mathilda’s affair with her brother-in-law, who promises her social advancement.
The problematic image of women behind it is emphasized by the figure of her half-sister. This Aurore, played by Lola Naymark, is a brutal despiser of the rag proletariat from which she herself descended. She rips off her customers, she stylizes herself as a sex bomb, hoping for a career in the amateur porn business. There is nothing else than sex and work in the couple’s world. Even the only scene that shows Daniel away from his family leads to a brothel. It sounds tough to blame a director of much better social dramas, but “love – bread of the poor” can also be a discriminatory cliché that should be avoided.
On the other hand, two male figures seem like figures of light: Only Mathildas, embodied by Robinson Stévenin, is more noble than Daniel. Nicolas, whose inability to walk over corpses, is interpreted by his partner as a weakness. Is it really the case that these traditional values still deserve such a presence in a contemporary film?
With his fellow generations, the Belgian Dardenne brothers and the now 85-year-old Ken Loach, 68-year-old Guédiguian is one of the most important representatives of social cinema. In his better films, he similarly succeeded in condensing complex political realities into compelling character studies. Nothing seems complex here, neither the realities nor the feelings, worse still: the simplification of the figures also shortens the trappings.
Gloria Mundi. F 2019. Directed by Robert Guédiguian. 106 Min.
