THE TOWN IS QUIET

The town is Marseille, and in Robert Guédiguian’s epic ensemble downer, it is less quiet than steeped in calamity. A lonely taxi driver (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) forms a liaison with a fish worker (Ariane Ascaride), paying her for backseat quickies; she then uses the money to buy her daughter’s smack. Guédiguian has an instinct for the buried shame of working-class squalor, but his film is inflated with a doom that feels programmatic rather than earned.