Time: The Present Place: An estate in the Paris banlieues. Population: Almost exclusively Arabic.
This is the kind of locale than in England we call a 'sink' estate where half the occupants are dealers and the other half users and a girl who reaches fourteen without having three children by three different fathers (thereby qualifying for her own flat and generous State support) is either a lesbian or a VERY ugly heterosexual. It would be nice to think that their local comprehensive was teaching Marlowe, Webster, Ben Johnson or even Shakespeare but somehow I doubt it. Yet Abdel Kechiche - whose idea of directing a film appears to be to plant his camera in the faces of a group of teenage Arabs living in the banlieues, tell them there's 100 euros waiting for the one who can utter the most variants on the F-word in 30 seconds and then yell 'Action' - tries to tell us that fourteen year old Arabs on the outskirts of Paris are so transformed by Marivaux's 'Le jeu d'amour et hasard' (The Game of Love and Chance) that they can't WAIT to rehears it on their own time and in the banlieue itself and get really uptight should they be interrupted. This contrast in lifestyles - the elegant world of Marivaux where manners are everything and the banlieues where good manners consist of kicking someone already on the ground only six instead of seven times in the head - is what passes for subtlety in Kechiche's book. So, fourteen year old Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) who's known Lydia (Sarah Forestier) all his life only really NOTICES her when she plays a 'lady' in Marivaux and is so smitten that he bribes the boy playing Arlequin to ankle and leave the way open for him. Credible? Bet your ass and that swampland in Florida is a STEAL at ten grand an acre.
This is the kind of locale than in England we call a 'sink' estate where half the occupants are dealers and the other half users and a girl who reaches fourteen without having three children by three different fathers (thereby qualifying for her own flat and generous State support) is either a lesbian or a VERY ugly heterosexual. It would be nice to think that their local comprehensive was teaching Marlowe, Webster, Ben Johnson or even Shakespeare but somehow I doubt it. Yet Abdel Kechiche - whose idea of directing a film appears to be to plant his camera in the faces of a group of teenage Arabs living in the banlieues, tell them there's 100 euros waiting for the one who can utter the most variants on the F-word in 30 seconds and then yell 'Action' - tries to tell us that fourteen year old Arabs on the outskirts of Paris are so transformed by Marivaux's 'Le jeu d'amour et hasard' (The Game of Love and Chance) that they can't WAIT to rehears it on their own time and in the banlieue itself and get really uptight should they be interrupted. This contrast in lifestyles - the elegant world of Marivaux where manners are everything and the banlieues where good manners consist of kicking someone already on the ground only six instead of seven times in the head - is what passes for subtlety in Kechiche's book. So, fourteen year old Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) who's known Lydia (Sarah Forestier) all his life only really NOTICES her when she plays a 'lady' in Marivaux and is so smitten that he bribes the boy playing Arlequin to ankle and leave the way open for him. Credible? Bet your ass and that swampland in Florida is a STEAL at ten grand an acre.