FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | review: L'esquive (Games of Love and Chance) |
|
|
|
| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Friday, 21 January 2005 | |
 The Parisian suburbs with their grey, uniform low-cost flats are a melting-pot of mostly North-African immigrants and locals and are often defined as the "problem areas" of one of Europe’s biggest cities. L'esquive (Games of Love and Chance), the second film of Tunisian-born director Abdellatif Kechiche (after La faute à Voltaire) is again set in this environment, though this time he chooses not to tell a tale about illegal immigration but rather a timid grammar school love-story (or rather the story of the lack of it) that could have been set anywhere but happens to be set in the Parisian problem areas. The good news is that it thus portrays the problem areas not as something negative but rather as something positive. The bad news is that the film itself is a bit of a problem area. Our leading man is the fifteen year old Abdelkrim -- Krimo for short -- and his relationship with his girlfriend is an on-off affair until he notices another girl in his class called Lydia. This little blonde, who has won the leading part in the school production of Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance is, perhaps unconsciously, a little too much Lolita for her own good. Soon Krimo is head-over-heels in love with this girl and devises a number of plans to invite her out, though most of them seem to fail simply because Lydia does not seem to notice Krimo is interested in her or if she does she prefers to make his life difficult. This simple premise is really all there is to this French film, though along the way we are treated to various encounters between a group of girls corresponding to Lydia’s friends and a group of boys who hang out with Krimo. They talk rough with each other though they need each other too. In a desperate attempt to win Lydia’s attention after she has told him she is unavailable to go out with him because she needs to practice daily for the play, Krimo bribes a friend to give him the male lead in the play. Never mind Krimo has no acting talent, and just thinking about the fact he needs to pretend to be in love with Lydia on stage -- let alone in real life -- makes his heart sink and makes him forget all his lines. The film, which runs for two hours, contains an enormous amount of talking, often several people at the time, and one wonders if the person who would need to subtitle L’esquive for foreign audiences would choose to superimpose their sentences on screen in order to give a graphic idea of how this all sounds. There is also an unnecessary amount of practice for the play, and the intertextual link between the play and the happenings in the film is too weak to make these scenes worthwhile. The performances of the young actors are all very raw; both Osman Elkharraz in the role of Krimo (having to act that he is acting badly) and Sara Forestier as his object of desire are utterly natural and convincing. The characters they provide us with are interesting, but the script and direction never seem to give them anything to really cling to, something that would draw the audiences in. Perhaps with some rigorous editing (that is, cut out forty minutes) this could be an interesting slice-of-life TV-film. As it stands, it has a lot of promise but it does not deliver. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
