Ignoring Accolades for a Raw Grounded Intuitive Vision

The French film Games of Love and Chance, this year’s winner of the César for Best Picture, opens with a group of adolescents swearing non-stop for five minutes. Interspersed between the sequence of standard “shits” and “what the hecks” are the more original and startling “I swear on the Koran” and “ I swear it to you on the Koran of the Mecque.” Like their curses, these adolescents combine their parents’ immigrant culture with their French nationality as they heat 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, he’s fallen in love with the rude angel-faced Lydia and struggles with highbrow French to participate in a high school play with her. But the entrance into a world of theater doesn’t imply any respite for Krimo—or for us—from coarse language or violence. Swearing and aggression are an inescapable element of this 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. In a soft-spoken, eloquent French, he described his journey towards filmmaking and his discoveries upon his arrival.

Kechiche was born in Tunisia in 1960. He started out as an actor, and in 1983, he obtained his first starring role in Thé à la Menthe. While acting, he also wrote scenarios. They spurred his foray into movie directing: “I wrote lots of scenarios from early on. I tried to find someone that would direct them, but couldn’t find anyone, so I decided to direct them myself.” His first movie was Blame it on Voltaire (2000), which narrates the story of a Tunisian emigrant in Paris who falls in love with a young French woman. For Voltaire, he received the Golden Lion for best first feature at the Venice Film Festival. In 2004, Games of Love and Chance, his low budget second movie, won the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay award at the Cesars—the French equivalent of the Oscars.

Despite accruing these prizes early in his career, Kechiche remains modest and focused on his current projects. He refuses, for instance, to act as a model filmmaker and give advice during interviews. When asked how he was dealing with all the recognition, he replies: “I haven’t 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 says. The handheld 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,” he says. “Making a film was very complicated technically. This changed however with the arrival of the affordable handheld camera in the ’80s. The cinematographic grammar—the lights, the mise-en-scène, the shots—is relatively simple. It is the way you use them that is complex.”

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; it’s more a question of gaze, of sensibility. Why shoot this or this profile? Unconsciously, it’s the actor that attracts the camera.”

During his filmmaking process, Kechiche focuses on the actors, or more specifically on the characters they portray. The characters give a voice and a human face to the underrepresented immigrant population in France.

But sending out a message is not essential for Kechiche. “The message of the film is not that important to me. Instead, I try to enjoy myself by 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 vulnerable during comically overdramatic breakups, 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.