Since 1980, French director Robert Guédiguian has been enmeshed in an ongoing filmmaking project without parallel in the history of cinema: 12 feature films to date, all filmed in his home city of Marseilles and all featuring the same three versatile actors: Ariane Ascaride (the filmmaker’s wife), Jean-Pierre Darrousin, and Gérard Meylan. In this their 11th collaboration, Ascaride plays a working-class woman with a cowardly, mean-spirited husband three years on the dole and a junkie daughter who ignores her bastard child and hooks for drug money. Darrousin is a lonely cab driver who falls for Ascaride, paying her for sex with francs that she then uses to purchase heroin for her helpless daughter. Meylan is the tough, laconic outsider who’s a middleman in Ascaride’s drug buying; he’s also a marksman whose eventual target is a smug, ultra-right politician. What could be an impossibly melodramatic story is unfolded with care and restraint by the much-talented Guédiguian, who even manages an optimistic tag onto this most pessimistic of Marseilles stories. In French with English subtitles.