France's most misunderstood city is actually its most exciting

Roughly 10 minutes into its near-two-and-a-half hours of taut cinematic story-telling, Stillwater flashes through a series of images of Marseille, bathed in the golden Provencal sunlight that has delighted painters ever since Vincent Van Gogh was drawn to the region.

There is France’s second-biggest city, shimmering in mid-afternoon warmth. The staircase that descends, in grand fashion, from the terrace in front of its Saint-Charles rail terminus – travellers slipping down the steps and into the hubbub of the metropolis. The main harbour, the Vieux Port, halyards clinking on the masts of the yachts tethered within it. The Saint-Victor district inching uphill on the opposite side of the marina, its gradient focused on the hilltop prize of Notre-Dame de la Garde – the sumptuous 19th-century basilica and crowning glory that is to Marseille what the Sacré Coeur is to Paris.

It all looks gorgeous. And it is a stark change of tone. The movie has spent its opening scenes in the very different context of Oklahoma, and the titular city of Stillwater – where Matt Damon’s lead character Bill Baker is bumping through life as an out-of-work oil-rigger. The sky is grey, the weather is oppressive, and Baker’s existence is pitted with difficulty: his struggle to find short-term jobs, his battle to stay sober, his damaged relationship with his daughter. But by the time he is standing on his hotel balcony in Marseille, its rooftops spreading out below him, and the sea swelling beyond, you might almost believe that this is one of those films that enfolds a specific city in bright colours and the camera’s tender gaze: Florence, as seen in the 1985 Merchant Ivory production of A Room With A View; Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Hall and Javier Bardem laughing and loving in the Catalan capital in 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone song-and-dancing through their idealised Hollywood, in 2016’s La La Land.

It isn’t. One of the reasons for Bill’s distance from his daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) – and for his journey across the Atlantic – is that she is in jail in Marseille; four years into a nine-year sentence for a murder – of her lover – that she insists she did not commit. Bill, encouraged by his only child’s talk of fresh evidence that will identify the actual killer, and weighed down by his earlier failings as a father, is desperate to clear her name, but cannot cope with the language barrier, or the intricacies of the French legal system. It is only when he makes the accidental acquaintance of Virginie (played by Call My Agent star Camille Cottin), a jobbing actress and single mother, that he is able to make any progress.

With this, Stillwater is more akin to those movies which take a celebrated city as their subject, but shine a torch on its shadows and problems as well as its postcard moments – Venice as a rain-soaked maze of dead ends in 1973’s Don’t Look Now; Bardem’s engagingly but unfailingly bleak opposite view of Barcelona in 2011’s Biutiful; Rio de Janeiro through a window of favela rivalries and drug gangs in 2002’s City of God. But just as Copacabana still gleams at the latter’s dangerous angle – and just as Donald Sutherland’s dashes down dank passageways cannot disguise the beauty of Venice – Stillwater cannot hide the majesty or magnificence of a French outsider which is both maligned and misunderstood.

Nor does it attempt to. Because it is perfectly set. If anywhere in France is an ideal setting for such a tale, it is the south-coast sentinel that has long been its most captivating city. As with many major ports, Marseille is a little chipped at the corners, a little frayed at the fringes. But it is enormously striking in both personality and location.

It is also France’s oldest city; a proper fragment of the pre-Christian world, its seeds planted in around 600BC (as “Massalia”; you can still see some of the foundation stones in the Port Antique park, just above the Vieux Port) by Greek sailors from ancient Phocaea (modern-day Anatolia in Turkey). It has been shaped ever since by its position on the Mediterranean, and the millennia of immigration this has brought. Its proximity to Algeria and Tunisia has gifted an exotic breadth to its accent and a spice to its palate, far beyond the stereotype of chic, gourmet Paris.

Indeed, it is a very different beast to the capital, which is a good three centuries younger and the best part of 500 miles to the north. Modern road and high-speed trains links have tamed the distance somewhat in terms of time and travel. But Marseille – simpler, saltier, wrapped in its own worries – isn’t interested in closing the gap in spirit, complaining that the main thing the SNCF network brings it from the Seine is second-home buyers. Virginie sums this up as she and Bill sit tangled in a traffic jam. “People don’t know how to drive here,” she tells him, exasperated. “It’s a crazy place. But I prefer it to Paris. People speak to each other here.”

Stillwater’s release has not been without controversy. An ill-judged interview given by Damon last week has mired its star in talk of homophobia – and there have been angry claims from the exonerated American Amanda Knox that the film is a distortion of her life in Italy in the late 2000s, and the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in 2007. The film’s writer and director Tom McCarthy (whose similar two-pronged work saw Spotlight win the Oscar for Best Picture in 2016) has acknowledged that the plot leans on those events in Perugia. But he also says that he was inspired by the “Marseille Trilogy” of crime novels crafted in the Nineties by the (Marseille-born) writer Jean-Claude Izzo – and by the basic process of spending time in the city.

“One visit to Marseille, and I knew I had found my port,” he explains. “The layers and textures of the city were undeniably cinematic, and the confluence of cultures and the pace of the seaside metropolis felt like the perfect canvas for the film.” His enthusiasm also saw him repel any murmurs about reducing costs by filming elsewhere. “Living and shooting in Marseille had a huge impact on the film,” he continues. “The more we leaned into it, the more the city opened up, and revealed itself to us. I don’t think there was a location we didn’t feel inspired by.”

This attention to detail is discernible on screen. Allison’s flat is on Place Notre Dame du Mont, a clever device which places the American exchange student at the top end of Rue d’Aubagne – the cluttered, chaotic one-way street that, with its Senegalese stores and Tunisian eateries sitting amid the boulangeries, is one of the pulses of African Marseille.

Stillwater treads a careful path between such contrasts. It probes playfully at the linguistic and cultural barriers between Virginie and Bill (she laughs at his statement that he owns guns; he is bemused by her amusement, and doesn’t understand her theatre work). And it doesn’t avert its gaze from the chasm between the city’s richer and poorer districts, admiring the boats and waterside cafes of the Vieux Port, but also turning to face the tougher banlieues. Indeed, filming took place in the Kalliste projects north of the centre (where Bill is sure the real killer lives), and at (the operational) Baumettes prison (where Allison is incarcerated).

The lens also lingers on the Cimetière Saint-Pierre, Marseille’s largest graveyard and equivalent of Paris’s Père-Lachaise, where some of its foremost sons and daughters are buried and where, for fictional purposes, Allison’s girlfriend Lina has been laid to rest.

The storyline also steps into the maelstrom of the Stade Velodrome, the city’s football temple, with real-life footage of an Olympique de Marseille fixture, all crowd bounce and flare bursts. Bill the character is baffled at first, telling Virginie’s daughter Maya that American football is “real football”; Damon the actor was much more enthralled. “Anybody who hasn’t experienced a soccer game in Europe – if you ever get the chance, you should do it,” he says. “[Filming at the Stade] was completely mental and really fun.”

Even if you don’t agree with this opinion, Stillwater shows off plenty of the Marseille that is well worth your time as a tourist. At one point, Virginie and Bill drive out of the city, along the Corniche which clings to the coastline as it dips south. Through the passenger window, the bay basks in the sunset, its collection of islands starting to turn to evening silhouette. In the foreground, Chateau D’If hugs its tiny outcrop in its traditional role as Marseille’s Alcatraz (although the cells within the fortress – used as a setting by Alexandre Dumas for The Count of Monte Cristo – stopped holding political prisoners in 1890). Just behind it, the wider Frioul archipelago keeps low to the water, Ratonneau scarcely more inhabited now than it was in 49BC when the Roman fleet which besieged the Greek port used it as a mooring place.

Both these islands can be visited by boat tour from the Vieux Port. No less accessible, of course, is Cassis, the soft-chinned D’Artagnan to Marseille’s grizzled Athos, 15 miles to the south-east, which is visible in the background when Virginie takes Bill to dinner at the seafront home of some wealthy friends. Better still, the spectacular obstacle which separates the city from its resort-town neighbour – the dramatic coves and cliffs of Calanques National Park – provide some of the film’s most magical scenes (see below).

Best of all is the movie’s insight into Marseille’s most evocative quartier. Virginie’s top-floor apartment is in the Panier. Pitched immediately north of, and above, the Vieux Port, this nest of steep streets and cheek-by-jowl housing could be described as the city’s soul. It was certainly its original kernel: Place de Lenche was the agora of the Greek settlement; Place des Moulins, its high point, was the acropolis. The 15 windmills which stood here in the 17th century are gone, lost to a “recent” history that saw the area become one of the city’s most deprived in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was still the red-light district in the late 20th, before the surge of gentrification and restoration that filled its alleys with bars, boutiques and olive-oil shops. Scars, of a sort, remain. The cloisters and courtyard of the Centre de la Vieille Charité (vieille-charite-marseille.com) – which now stage temporary art exhibitions – were built as a poor-house between 1671 and 1749.

The district’s loftiness means wonderful views of the city; Maya’s bedroom window peers across to Notre Dame de la Garde. To reach the basilica from the Panier requires so tiring a walk (down to the Vieux Port, around it, up the slope on the other side) that it is worth pausing en route. Perhaps at Fort Saint-Jean, the guard dog at the entrance to the harbour that, in its own way, is an emblem of Marseille’s semi-estrangement from the rest of France. As of 2013, when the city was a European Capital of Culture, it has housed the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, an institution which explores the movement of people around the continent (mucem.org).

It has not always been so enlightened. It was commissioned by Louis XIV, officially to protect the port in a time of seemingly perennial war, but also during a period of open rebellion in the city. Only when it was finished in 1671 did the Marseillais note that its cannons were aimed inland.

There has been another estrangement of late. This week has seen the lifting of the quarantine requirement for fully vaccinated British travellers returning from France – but for much of the pandemic, it has been tricky to cross the Channel from the UK, let alone visit Marseille. Yet this fracture in our capacity to move about is what, according to Cottin, makes Stillwater a movie of its time. “The film is about travelling and meeting other people. This is something we’ve been cruelly deprived of,” she says. “It’s a beautiful movie to share now, because it’s really about finding yourself, about going away to meet people, and open yourself.”

Damon is more direct, talking of “an unbelievably beautiful city”. “Hopefully this movie will look like a love-letter to Marseille,” he enthuses, “because it’s a really special place.”

Stillwater is showing in UK cinemas. At time of publishing, overseas travel was subject to restrictions. Check the relevant guidance before booking and travelling.

Calanques cool: What are they and how to explore them

Some of the most appealing moments in the movie come when Allison – on day-release from jail – accompanies her father to the Calanques. Here, she swims and splashes in the shallows of the limestone inlets that pierce 15 miles of the shoreline due south of the city.

If the visual metaphor – the prisoner enjoying a few hours of freedom by floating in still water – seems a little obvious, it doesn’t detract from what can be a gloriously tranquil experience in real life. It is no great fit of hyperbole to argue that these coves and chasms comprise the most spectacular section of the entire French south coast. The French might even agree. The area, which comprises 201 square miles of land and sea in total, was officially enshrined as the Parc National des Calanques (calanques-parcnational.fr/en) in 2012. This was no small promotion. France has just 11 national parks, and of these, only eight are in Europe. The formal protection of these slender gorges was a declaration of their huge importance.

The whole park is within easy range of Marseille. You can enter it via its north flank at Luminy (the last stop on the B1 bus from the centre), or from the east at Cassis. In a way, it makes no difference; the geography is magnificent at every juncture. Particular highlights include the Calanque de Port Pin, the Calanque d’En Vau and the Calanque de Morgiou, but whether you decide to hike the trails that connect them, or join the locals in sunbathing on the rocks, you are sure to reach for your cameraphone at frequent intervals.

One other thing is certain. You have to explore on foot. Not just because of the park’s status, but because the terrain is so craggy. Unusually for a section of shore on the French Mediterranean, there is no coast road. The D559 abandons the fight in Marseille suburb Mazargues, turning its journey to Cannes inland until it can rejoin the waterline at Cassis.