Opening with a stately panorama of director Robert Guédiguian's native Marseilles, the site of all his recent sociopolitical melodramas, The Town Is Quiet announces itself as a broad inventory of urban life in the days before the year 2000. A French counterpart to leftist filmmakers such as Ken Loach or John Sayles, Guédiguian (Marius Et Jeannette) deals with working-class issues on a micro scale, infusing his political points with warmth, humor, and generosity toward his beleaguered characters. In terms of ambition and scope, The Town Is Quiet recalls Sayles' City Of Hope, another interconnected (and ironically titled) ensemble piece that conducts a wide-reaching survey of labor problems, racism, violence, and other social ills. But whereas Sayles sought to reveal an entire corrupt system at work, with each citizen an unwitting cog in the machine, Guédiguian scales back to a multifaceted slice-of-life, more delicately interwoven but not nearly as powerful or resonant as a social statement. Of the roughly dozen characters, only three are adequately sketched and their stories never quite cohere into a larger whole, as if he suddenly lost interest in certain subplots and left them on the cutting-room floor. (The varying run times—listed at 154 minutes at the Toronto Film Festival, 143 at Venice, and released here at 127—may explain the narrative gaps.) The director's wife and favorite screen subject, Ariane Ascaride, stars as a middle-aged woman who works back-breaking shifts at a local fish market and comes home to her sullen, layabout husband and a daughter (Christine Brücher) consumed by heroin addiction. When the girl becomes too strung-out to turn tricks for drug money, Ascaride resorts to prostituting herself to pay for her fix, procuring heroin through an old friend (Gérard Meylan) with shady connections. Jean-Pierre Darroussin plays Ascaride's only customer, a lonely single man who blows the redundancy pay from his dock job on a taxicab, but runs out of money and loses his license. Guédiguian and co-writer Jean-Louis Milesi add several other players to the mix, most notably an ex-convict (Alexandre Ogou) turned social activist and a music teacher (Julie-Marie Parmentier) looking to divorce her cynical and womanizing husband, but all the roles are undernourished, if not disposable. Yet despite its inadequacies, The Town Is Quiet does a remarkably subtle and effective job linking the increasing desperation of its characters to the problems of society-at-large. As their lives reel from the impact of unemployment and criminal vice, Ascaride and Darroussin's stories dovetail so poignantly that the others seem like a distraction by comparison. Guédiguian aims for a sweeping millennial statement, but he's better suited to a telescope than a kaleidoscope.