A LA PLACE DU COEUR

SYNOPSIS
Despite their tender ages, 18 and 16 respectively, Baby (Alexandre O Gou) and Clim (Laure Raoust) – long-time childhood sweethearts in a seaside, working-class neighbourhood of Marseilles – are not only in love, they are determined to be married. An interracial couple – Baby is Black, Clim is Caucasian – their dizzy joy is shattered when Baby is framed by a racist cop, and thrown in prison to await trial. Then Clim discovers she is pregnant to Baby. Clim, her family and Baby’s family will require each other’s support in the formidable struggle to prove Baby’s innocence. In the process, a remarkable bond is formed between Clim’s father, Joel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), and Baby’s adoptive father Franck (Gerard Meylan).

"Robert Guediguian’s masterful interpretation of the James Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk transports us directly into the midst of its characters’ travails. This is the secret of the resonance and sensitivity it evokes from a remarkably simple story. The brilliance of If Beale Street Could Talk – set among a seething amalgam of bigotry, sanctimony and poverty in 1970s Harlem – lies more in the psychology and relationships of its characters than in their battle against racial injustice. Under the aegis of Guediguian’s direction, Baldwin’s narrative survives a journey across the Atlantic, a two-decade skip forward in time and the transfiguring of its two black American young lovers to an even younger interracial couple, not to mention the A La Place Du Coeur title transplant, with its own Le Coeur beating vigorously. Love in all its guises – romantic, erotic, uxorious, filial, maternal – is rarely portrayed with such honesty and insight. Stunning performances by the entire cast augment Guediguian’s fine sense of subtlety to realise an intelligent and sensual portrait of desire and resilience, self-righteousness and self-sacrifice. As the story seamlessly unveils in episodic flashbacks, the bonds between the characters are forged and tested, their individual determination called upon and their varying faiths and driving forces revealed. This is one of those rare films that present a slice of life au naturel; the vicissitudes, hardships and tragedies offset by glimmers of hope and the sustenance of love. See it, and take a glimpse into the essence of reality."
Brad Green