Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance
The French film Games of Love and Chance, last years Cesar Festival favorite, opens on a group of adolescents swearing non-stop for five minutes. Interspersed between the sequence of classical shits and what the hecks (these are the milder instances) are the more original I swear on the Koran and I swear it to you on the Koran of the Mecque. Like their curses, the adolescents involved combine their parents immigrant culture with their French nationality. The delinquents are heating up for a brawl in the dismal suburbs of Paris.
But the brawl never happens, or more exactly, we never get to see it. Instead, we follow one of the boys, Krimo, as he walks away from the group. The next thing we know, hes fallen in love with the rude angel-faced Lydia and struggles with highbrow French to participate in a high school play with her. Not that the entrance into a world of theatre means any respite for Krimo (or for us) from coarse language or violence. Swearing and aggression are an inescapable element of suburban life.
How strange then, to see Abdellatif Kechiche, the director of Games of Love and Chance and the creator of these rebellious characters, calmly seated and smiling like a Buddha. This was last month, at an interview in New York. In a soft voice and flowing French, he described his journey towards film making and his discoveries upon his arrival.
Abdellatif Kechiche was born in Tunisia in 1960. His initial vocation was acting, and in 1983, he obtained his first starring role in Thé à la Menthe. While acting, he also wrote scenarios. They caused his foray into movie directing: I wrote lots of scenarios from early on. I tried to find someone that would direct them, but couldnt find anyone, so I decided to direct them myself he expained. Blame it on Voltaire(2000) is his first movie. It narrates the story of a Tunisian emigrant in Paris who falls in love with a young French woman. It was awarded best first film prize at the festival of Venice. In 2004, Games of Love and Chance, his low-budgeted second movie, won best film, best direction and best screenplay awards at the Cesar festival.
Yet despite all the prizes heaped on top of him early on, Kechiche remains modest and focused on his projects. He refuses, for instance, to act as a model film maker and give advice during interviews. When asked how he was dealing with all the recognition, he replied: I havent had time to realize it yet, right now, I am terribly busy with my third film. Even though he is internationally recognized, the budget for his third movie is as restricted as that of Games of Love and Chance.
But Kechiche is used to limited budgets and accepts their disadvantages. Cinema needs financing, everything has a cost, and we pay with technical and artistic sacrifices he declared. The hand-held camera, for instance, in Games of Love and Chance is a time-saving (and therefore money-saving) device.
Kechiche began directing with no education whatsoever in film. He does not consider this an artistic impediment. For him, in the beginning at least, it was a purely technical impediment. In the 1970s, I found the world of directing inaccessible without film studies. Making a film was very complicated technically. This changed however with the arrival of the affordable hand-held camera in the 80s. the cinematographic grammarthe lights, the mise en scene, the shotsis relatively simple. It is the way you use them that is complex. he explained.
Maybe because of this, his choice of shots is intuitive and spontaneous instead of scholarly. I choose my shot angles depending on what attracts my eye, its more a question of gaze, of sensibility. Why shoot this or this profil? Unconsciously, its the actor that attracts the camera.
During his film making process, Kechiche focuses on the actors, or more specifically on the characters they portray. The characters give a voice, a human face to the under represented immigrant population in France.
But message is not essential for Kechiche The message of the film is not that important to me, instead, I try to enjoy myself telling a story, I am attached to my characters so I want the audience to be attached to them too, I want my characters to live.
And, in Games of Love and Chance, he succeeds. We see Lydia, Krimo and the other adolescents at their most vulnerableduring comically overdramatic break-ups, rejections and love scenes. In those moments, they innocently stammer. They conceal their pain and their uncertainty, with faltering curses. Then, even a curse becomes endearing.
