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Movies Forum Index » International Movies Forum » _Games of Love and Chance_
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 Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 3:29 pm |
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Or _L'Esquive_, a terrific, well-reviewed feature
by Abdellatif Kechniche, a French-Tunisian director.
Usually 4 Cesar awards all but confirm a film's
mediocrity. Not this one, which in 2005 beat out
_A Very Long Engagment_, a film I otherwise greatly
enjoy, but is nowhere as revelatory as _Games
of Love and Chance_. The film depicts the lives
and loves of mostly African immigrant teenagers
in a project. They hang out in the housing
projects, talk tough among themselves and trade
barbs with rival cliques. The person who did
the subtitles must have taken major poetic license
with the slang (mixed with references to the Koran),
no doubt substituting American flavors of the day
for the French, which makes you wonder if anyone
can figure out what they are saying 10 years from
now. The audience will always be understand
and be entralled by the high-flown, passionate
rhetorics of the Marivaux play alluded to in
the film's title. For these teens are also
enthusiastically rehearsing for a school performance,
even spending much of their off-school hours at
it. The ring-leaders are Lydia, the only Caucasian
(Sara Forestier) who is a serious prima donna,
arrives at events an hour late, and orders others
around, but also gives excellent, imagintive advice
to her peers; and Frida (Sabirna Ouazani), only
slightly less of a diva. Krimo, our shy and sullen
protagonist, is smitten with his childhood
friend Lydia. Immigrant teenager obsessed with the
neighborhood blonde girl seems a recurring theme
in films made by African-French filmmakers (see
the much inferior _Lila Says_, directed by a woman).
Krimo has just broken up with his long time girl
friend and his male buddies keep giving him
unneeded prodding and disastrious help in advancing
his romantic agenda.
As taught by the energetic drama teacher, the
titular Marivaux play involves some "False Servant"
type subtefuge. Maiden and maid switch identity
but ultimately fall for suitors of their own class.
In the film, it everyone is in the same socio-economical
strata. The ethinicity doesn't provide a divide
either; Lydia is fully accepted as one of the gang,
standing out only because of her stunning personality.
(The Asian dressmaker is regretfully the target
of much racial slurs, although some of the younger
kids seem to fit in the melting pot.) In an
early rehearsal scene Frida becomes ballistic
when lectured by Lydia, and is also self-conscious
at her "maid" role when Krimo is in the audience.
But the fierce quarrel evaporates and the best
friends seem to forget the fight immediately. These
verbal confrontations are interpersed with Marivaux's
classical repartees After a while the two merge and
no longer form a contrast; he sheer passion,
conviction, immediacy, and lyric grace of these
confrontations (shot hand-held, often in extreme
close up) are beautiful to watch, even if the
English subtitles only remotely resemble the French
slang. These kids are so fully alive, so likeable
in their dedication to their performance. The
filmmaker never focuses on the negative side of
their lives. They grow up in a tough neighborhood
but are full of confidence and hope. Even Krimo's
pint-size goon pal -- the only villain in the film
-- who bullies the girls, beat Frida up, and lands
them in trouble with the cops, gets his comeuppance
and humiliation, and then the incidence is seemingly
forgetten and forgiven. He is accepted as part
of the community again. Life goes on.
Krimo never does. I bet he never forgets or forgives
anything. In the final scene we see him sulk and
hide from Lydia. He is not lively, beautiful like
the others, not "likeable" (the jouralistic slur
that may doomthe U.S. government for another decade).
Sensitive to begin with, love and rejection cements
his solitude. Quite a few reviewers read this
negatively, as the end of his dreams. I wonder if
the withdrawal of our protagonist into himself isn't
meant to be uplifting. Maybe Krimo is the director's
alter ego, the silent one who watches and becomes
an artist. Maybe Marivaux's divide is re-configured,
not as a racial/economical determinism but as something
more fundamental and humanistic -- the way each
individual confronts the world. After what happened
in the outskirts of Paris last year, surely that
cannot be a bad thing. |
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