Hey folks Harry here with Sheldrake's final flick thrust in front of you today. He's apparently seen a great French Zombie flick I can't wait to hear about. But first, L'ESQUIVE - an entirely different type of French film. And one that seems to have hit Sheldrake with a whole plethora of emotional and intellectual responses - that even throught the review he's continuing to digest. AH... a sign of true cinema! Here ya go...
L'esquive (Games of Love and Chance)
March 25th 2005
French
directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
2005 Cesars
Winner Best Director, Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Female Newcomer
Sheldrake here,reporting live from midtown in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art is running it’s New Directors / New Films series from March 23rd through April 3rd. Go to MOMA’s site (www.moma.org) and check out the schedules. This series focuses on the films of directors young in their career and some of the stuff I’ve seen has blown me away—and some hasn’t—so keep reading today’s review for more. I don’t know what MOMA is up to over there on 53rd Street, but, along with the renovation of the museum, they’ve renovated their film programs and have made them among the most exciting in town. Modern Art, indeed.
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I've spent three days wondering how I would write this review for L’ESQUIVE, how I would explain my own reactions to you, and I think I can do it now.
What was the problem? I walked out of L’ESQUIVE angry, pissed off, offended, puzzled and convinced that it was one of the worst pieces of trash I 'd seen in some time. walking away from the movie, I talked with another critic who concurred. we weren't just walking out of a bad film, we were angry that a culture existed that would make this film, that there were people who would pay for the film, we were angry that this was what the world had come to.
And the next morning, I woke up as usual, had some coffee in the kitchen of my aparment, and found my thoughts kept moving back to the film, to it’s characters, Krimo, the soft-spoken boy who dares to be an actor to get the attention of the girl he loves: Lydia, the beautiful firebrand, the brilliant student actress, the object of desire; Fathi, Krimo’s tall, not-very-bright, violent, impatient friend; Nanou and Sabrina, one a manipulative plain girl, the other a second talented actress…and as I brought them up one at at time in my imagination, I fell in love with them – felt for them – was transformed in my thinking by them. After I’d seen the film.
Now I think that L’ESQUIVE may be the best movie I’ve seen this year. It’s angry passion and generous heart and honesty—the press kits coins the neologism neo-Cassavetes, and there’s something to that. The director has an honest eye that looks unblinking at the world and comes away with pictures of things truly, and either you have the stomach for that or you don’t.
So, why the delayed reaction?
First, let’s set L’ESQUIVE in its world: its a film whose characters live mentally in the world of urban music; their responses are formed by 50 cent and The Game and Eminem and Jay-Z, not by the dreamy romances of Sinatra, the Beatles and Elton John, nor even by the sexuality-as-solution of the Rolling Stones, Queen or Bowie, or by the brainy game-playing of Talking Heads or B52s or Suzanne Vega or Velvet Underground. These are the children of the housing projects outside Paris, mostly filled by North Africans, Muslims. The way that mobsters I the 60s and 70s learned to talk by watching gangster movies from the 30s and 40s, these kids learned to talk by watching their urban heroes slander and verbally (and otherwise) assault each other as an everyday thing. The subtitles of the movie ar translated into Engish using the urban vocabulary. The kids shove and throw and curse and smash each other and scream at each other as normal discourse. They also refer to the Koran and Allah a lot but they aren’t particularly religious, as far as I can tell, and they never quote it. The Muslim street sensibility and it’s, strange to say, hipness inform the movie: even the actual French girl in the movie swears she’s telling the truth by saying (in translation in the subtitles), “Inch’Allah, she is a ho.”
I remember when I first heard Sugar Hill Gang and my reaction was, wow, this is a great novelty record. Then a few years later 2 Live Crew came out and I thought, wow, ok, me luv you long time, these guys are really cool, really pushing the envelope. Then gangsta happened and I thought, ok, whoa, I’m checking out, and I’m really kind of a melody and harmony guy anyway, not to mention a musical performance major in college. But over time I got used to it, then came to understand it as a natural outgrowth of white American stupidity in dealing with its race problems by sticking one quarter of the African American population in jail, then I came to like quite a bit of it. Now, after all that edge-hugging, it’s really just another musical genre Born In America, serving to defang real political response by absorbing and redirecting the dangerous energies of the young and disaffected.
Now along comes L’ESQUIVE and we’re living, like it or not, back on the edge. American culture has launched, not a language, but an entire cultural response that transcends language for the powerless to empower themselves, and it’s being adapted by Muslim kids in France, Israeli kids on kibbutzs in the settlements and white kids in Detroit. (Ain’t America great? No wonder France hates us: muslim culture and european culture have had a dialog going on for a thousand years, sometimes the tide flows one way over the national borders, sometimes the other, but this time the colonial chickens have come home to roost and American culture is helping the other side! Merde! ) The intentionally vulgar and in your face language of urban is loud and it scares the adults and civilized people hate it: in other words, it’s perfect for teenagers. Frankly, anyone who’s frightened of hip-hop doesn’t understand the way American capitalism, and now the global marketplace, domesticates and dominates all protest by rendering it just another table selling Oyster Lucys at the Great American Flea Market. Hip-hop, like rock n’roll before it, deftly replaces the idea of political protest with the idea of narcissistic and self-serving self-expression, which produces the cultural objet that can be offered up on E-Bay or your Aunt Lilly’s website. Someone will groan, “oh that’s SO true” and purchase it.
The movie’s creative structure embodies that venerable but still useful device, the play within the play, to do a few things: comment on the action, give romantic words to an inarticulate character and provide a great final scene of the play’s performance that is a sweet benediction for the rest of the play – you know how Simpson’s episodes often depict brutal behavior for most of the show, then have wrap up that leaves you with a warm and fuzzy? Or that Mary Tyler Moore show where Ted has a heart attack and all the yuks come from maligning him, until the final moment when Mr. Grant realizes “Ted’s right! Every moment is precious!” and Grant, Mary and Murray all stand on the balcony taking in the day’s sunset.
One of the movies many subtle ironies is that the play shown is one of Marivaux’s, a french writer of comedies in the early 1700s, whose particular brand of Wildean artificiality was so individualistic it gave birth to a new French word (and we all know how difficult the Acadame’ makes that) meaning artificiality, marivaudage. It’s ironic because the play within a play is already artificial and serves to provide an elevated subtext to the action of the movie.
L’ESQUIVE will demand an honest response from you. Hatred may be the first step, as it was mine; understanding the second and, if you’re lucky, love the third. The movie left my heart aching, left me with more questions than i have answers for. Can the world change any way at all, and if the demographic is overwhelming, do we just declare it 'good' and move on? I just don’t know. These kids are adopting a culture from which they'll spend years recovering, and i guess that makes me angry – but they’re busy solving their own problems in their own way, and they don’t care what I think. That’s as it should be.
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