Marius and Jeannette

If your idea of a good time is leaving a theater unable to get Pavarotti's rendition of "O Sole Mio" out of your head, you're welcome to Robert Guédiguian's Marius and Jeannette. That's one of the musical banalities (Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons are two others) cranked up on the soundtrack to augment its varying moods of bathos, sappiness, and precious whimsy. Set in ƒstaque, a working-class suburb of Marseilles, this is the story of Jeannette (the director's wife, Ariane Ascaride), a loudmouthed 40ish single mom fired from her job as a check-out clerk. She meets Marius (Gérard Meylan) while attempting to steal cans of paint from the site of a cement factory under demolition where he works as a guard.

Perhaps because the plant was where her father died in an explosion when she was just a child (just one of three tragic accidents in the movie), the two hit it off, engaging in the kind of quixotic relationship in which the laughs are hearty and fake and the heartaches lachrymose and contrived. Backing the pair up are Jeannette's salt-of-the-earth multicultural neighbors and an agenda that reeks of kneejerk socially conscious pieties. Dedicated to the region's anonymous workers, the film does itself no favors by bringing to mind Marius, Maurice Pagnol's seven-decades-old paean to Marseilles's poor, a masterpiece that celebrates its subject rather than exploiting it anew. At the Coolidge Corner.

-- Peter Keough