of Guédiguian concentrated in a very beautiful film of love, joy and melancholy mixed

Four years after painting a disenchanted world in Gloria Mundi, released in 2019, Marseille director of Armenian origin Robert Guédiguian returns with And the party continues! A film about transmission, which reconnects with wonder and faith in humanity, despite disillusionment. To be discovered in theaters from November 15.

Rosa is called Rosa because Rosa Luxembourg. Antonio, his brother, Antonio because Antonio Gramsci. These two, brother and sister, in their sixties, grew up with a father committed to the PC, and they each defend in their own way the values ​​he transmitted to them.

Antonio, a taxi driver, is an inveterate seducer, but he helps those who need it, even if the request falls in the middle of the night. Rosa, a hospital nurse, widowed, lives alone, but her two grown sons are never far away. Minas, a doctor, treats migrants in detention centers. Sarkis is the owner of the Armenian bar and headquarters of the Armenian community in Marseille, run by the men of the family from father to son. He is in love with Alice, choir director and activist in an association for the defense of the poorly housed.

Alice’s presentations take place at Rosa’s house, in her apartment overlooking the old port of Marseille, around anchovy pasta, the family’s favorite dish. Sarkis and Alice, Antonio and his roommate, Minas with his wife and daughters… The whole clan comes together to welcome the young woman. All that’s missing is Alice’s father, who soon shows up in Marseille.

Bookseller, idle retiree, he is determined to make up for lost time with his daughter, whom he has always neglected in favor of books and literature. His return is received coldly by the young woman, who resents him and prefers to spend her time with the choir she directs or helping the poorly housed in the Marseille city. Lonely, Henri approaches Rosa, in the middle of the municipal campaign, who is trying to bring together the different currents of the left and the environmentalists, obsessed with their top candidate…

“There are no more communists”

Deployed under the aegis of Homer, and more broadly of literature, which is very present, this new film by Robert Guédiguian once again brings together his entire cinema family, from Ariane Ascaride to Jean-Pierre Darroussin, via Gérard Meylan . This is also the subject of this film. Family. The one we inherit, which comes from far away, here from the confines of Armenia scarred by the genocide and once again in danger. That of Marseille, which for the director is confused with that of the Armenians (“It was the Armenians who founded Marseille” says Sarkis in a joke). Marseille, its beauty and its misery, which the director films with ever more love. But also the family that we create, and whose cement, at Guédiguian, crystallizes around values ​​and commitments.

The director stages in the microcosm of Marseille the political fights of the left, which despair Rosa. “You had your top list, it has just been released” Henri asserts against activists from all sides after yet another fruitless meeting. This head of the list is Rosa who will end up launching.

If political commitment is still at the heart of the film, this time it is with a half-amused, half-nostalgic distance. The director can only note: “There are no more communists! There are twelve left in Marseille!” Rosa blurted out to her brother. “You will soon be the last” she adds, bursting out laughing. A joke which sums up the collapse of values, literally represented by the drama of the rue d’Aubagne, the beating heart of the film. “How to survive collapse and emptiness, in the most abstract, most theoretical sense… The collapse of our grand narratives and the consequent emptiness of our ways of life. How Homer can tell us new epics. Under what shapes.”, asks the director.

“The world needs you”

But the struggle continues. On the street, in associations, in hospitals, at school. “It’s the only way to do politics”underlines Antonio. “And it’s more of us who can do it”he adds, as a message addressed to the new generations destined to take over. “The world needs you”, Rosa confirms to her young colleague Laetitia. A lineage made up of inheritances, but also of adoptions, whether in politics or in the family, as for Sarkis, madly eager for children with an Alice who cannot give him any.

The filmmaker offers moments of pure beauty, a nocturnal waltz in a square between two lovers to the sound of the piano, a very tight tracking shot of Rosa, a child, glued to her father, both speeding in the wind on an office motorcycle from vote to vote, or this monologue from Rosa, at night, in an abandoned swimming pool or in a stone amphitheater, under the amazed eyes of Henri…

Film on transmission, And the party continues! concentrates everything that the Marseille director has defended since his beginnings: a certain idea of ​​cinema, which for him merges with life, with family, with commitment. “We must constantly affirm that nothing is over, that everything is beginning”, Rosa whispers outside her window. She is no longer young, neither are Antonio and Henri, but love, partying, fighting, life… Everything continues!

The sheet

Gender : Drama
Director: Robert Guédiguian
Actors: Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Lola Naymark, Gérard Meylan, Robinson Stévenin, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Alice Da Luz Gomes
Country : France
Duration : 1h46
Exit : November 15 2023
Distributer : Diaphana Distribution

Synopsis : In Marseille, Rosa, 60 years old, devoted her life to her family and to politics with the same sense of sacrifice. Everyone thinks that she is unshakeable, especially since Rosa is the only one who could seal the union of the left on the eve of a decisive electoral deadline. She ultimately copes well with all this, until the day she falls in love with Henri. For the first time, Rosa is afraid to commit. Between the pressure from his political family and his desire to let go, the dilemma is heavy to bear.