Why Hollywood cannot get sufficient of France’s ‘crime metropolis’ Marseille

By AFP
Its dirty glamour and dazzling mild have captivated administrators from Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg, and now Marseille is the setting for at least three movies on the Cannes movie competition, together with Matt Damon’s newest drama. 

France’s raffish Mediterranean second metropolis has iconic standing in Hollywood because the setting for “The French Connection” thrillers of the Nineteen Seventies. 

Lately, the slim alleys main right down to its Old Port have been thick with movie crews.

As properly because the Netflix sequence “Marseille”, which performed up the town’s popularity for corruption and criminality with Gerard Depardieu as its crooked however charismatic mayor, a crop of gritty movies by younger French administrators have additionally thrown it again into the highlight.

“Stillwater”, which premieres at Cannes on Thursday, has Damon as a fish-out-of-water American oil-rig employee making an attempt to get his daughter out of jail for a homicide she claims she didn’t commit.

– New York on the Med –

The movie was made by Tom McCarthy, who made the Oscar-winning “Spotlight” and launched “Game of Thrones” star Peter Dinklage to the world with “Station Agent”. 

It is not any shock that he ought to mild upon Marseille, stated William Benedetto, who runs the town’s mythic Alhambra cinema.

“Marseille is the most American city in Europe. Its port, like New York’s, has been the springboard for so many stories,” he advised AFP.

Like the Big Apple, Marseille can also be a multicultural Babel, a metropolis of immigrants with a giant persona whose heroes and villains stroll the tightrope of legality.

Netflix snapped up one other Marseille-set movie, “BAC Nord”, earlier than it even premiered at Cannes, exactly as a result of it has the hard-boiled high quality of an early Martin Scorsese movie.

It attracts on a real-life corruption scandal within the metropolis’s powerful northern suburbs the place detectives had been accused of stealing from the drug sellers they had been supposed be locking up.

Also penetrating these tower blocks is “A Good Mother” by acclaimed French actor-director Hafsia Herzi, which can also be opening at Cannes. 

As a local of the town, Herzi had the credentials to movie there, however nonetheless needed to negotiate with the locals earlier than capturing.

– Resists and revolts –

Many legendary administrators have been drawn to Marseille, together with Hitchcock (“Rich and Strange”), Spielberg (“Catch Me If You Can”), and Alexander Korda, who made a trilogy of movies concerning the metropolis. 

And the variety of movies and sequence shot there has tripled within the final decade, in response to native officers. 

That’s nice for the financial system however maybe dangerous for its popularity, since many play on its stereotype because the violent and harmful “Kalashnikov City”.

“Marseille is a city that resists, that fights, that revolts, that doesn’t take anything lying down, and that borderline side of it can sometimes end up as a caricature-like in ‘BAC Nord’,” stated author Vincent Thabourey.

– Matt Damon ‘a fan’ –

But the cliches have additionally given France’s former colonial port a worldwide profile, he added.

That will get one other increase from “Stillwater”, with Damon telling reporters on the crimson carpet in Cannes that the “Marseille is a real character in the film” and even jokingly saying he was now a fan of its fanatically-supported soccer workforce, Olymipue de Marseille. 

Damon stated he drew on his personal feelings as a father of ladies to channel the anger and frustration of a misplaced Oklahoma redneck overseas.

The character “runs into all the issues you have when you have the language and cultural impediment that an Oklahoma roughneck would have abroad,” Damon stated.

The actor, after all, has historical past in Marseille because it was a fisherman from the town that pulled an unconscious Jason Bourne from the Mediterranean firstly of the blockbuster franchise.

Trying to do justice to a “city as complex as Marseille is a real challenge for directors”, stated Thabourey, which is “why they probably keep coming back”.