27 November 2021

Robert Guédiguian's Marie-Jo et ses deux amours (2002)

If this can be described as a love story, it's a very painful one, and one-sided. The difference here is that, in spite of the (very subtle) sex scenes, it's slightly unusual in being about love in middle age, the eternal triangle in middle age. Joseph Mai mentions utopia a number of times, and I can understand that from the point of view of Marie-Jo (Ariane Ascaride), although only very briefly: she wants to have two cocks and eat them at the same time, which is of course impossible.

Marie-Jo is a care worker who also does the paperwork for her husband Daniel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who has a construction business. She is very much in love with him but is also secretly very much in love with Marco (Gérard Meylan|), and inevitably Daniel will find out about this: to his credit he doesn't blow up about it, although his sadness, his sense of loss, is evident. Also evident is the pained reaction of Daniel and Marie-Jo's daughter Julie (Julie-Marie Parmentier). Clearly, the centre cannot hold because there isn't one: tragedy is inevitable, in whatever guise it may hold.

It comes in an accident in Daniel's very modest sailing craft dedicated to his wife, when he ventures he knows not where with her, knocks his head on the boat and falls into the water apparently unconscious. Frantic, Marie-Jo dives in after him, can only hold his hand and the couple are found washed up on the shore. As Julie leaves the morgue with her boyfriend Sylvain (Yann Trégouët), the bag in which she is holding her parents' belongings makes a ringing sound: it's Marco calling his lover, and Julie fishes out the mobile and tells him that it's no use calling as her parents are dead. Obviously, this is not optimistic like the contes de l'Estaque, far from L'Argent fait le bonheur, Marius et Jeannette and L'Attaque !.

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