Abdellatif Kechiche's Mektoub My Love (2017)

Abdellatif Kechiche's Mektoub My Love – the first of a trilogy – is the follow-up to the director's highly successful (and ultimately highly controversial) La Vie d'Adèle, and like Kechiche's previous La Graine et le mulet is set in Sète and also features Hafsia Herzi, this time as Camélia. It's not so much a narrative as a drift, a hymn to youth and young life, concentrating on (mainly female) bodies on the beach, in the sea, in restaurants, and clubbing. At almost three hours one critic said that it would have made a good ninety minute film, but this would have anchored it far too much into the artificial: Mektoub (meaning destiny) is a movie that moves slowly, and radically cutting it would have reduced its impact. This film, like Rohmer's, is never boring, and to some extent it's a sexier, more modern update of (in particular) Rohmer's beach films.

The male gaze is present from the beginning of this film set in 1994, when Amin (Shaïn Boumédine) – a former medical student in Paris who's decided to take up photography and perhaps become a film director (autobiographical hints here) – returns to Sète and spies on his friend (although he'd rather be her lover) Ophélie (Ophélie Bau, who's supposedly engaged to someone else) having sex with the local lothario Tony (Salim Kechiouche), Amin's cousin. The voyeuristic element, with Amin peeping in through the external blinds of the bedroom, has echoes later in the film, the camera dwelling on parts of the female anatomy in more social as opposed to private scenes.

Very different from his sexually adventurous cousin, the shy Amin prefers to watch, to stand on the sidelines, ideally using his camera. While Tony chats up Charlotte (Alexia Chardard) with experienced ease, in a later long dance scene Charlotte's friend Céline (an ever-vacantly smiling Lou Luttiau) is stolen from him by a local.

Whereas Amin's Tunisian parents run a restaurant, Ophélie's parents have a sheep farm, and Ophélie treats Amin to all the photographs he likes of arguably the most stunning long scene in the film: a ewe giving birth to two lambs to the musical accompaniment of Mozart. Mektoub is a feast for the eyes, but not for the brain. 

Abdellatif Kechchiche's La Graine et le mulet | Couscous | The Secret of the Grain (2008)

As usual with translations, my reaction to La Graine et le mulet being titled Couscous (in English) and The Secret of the Grain (in American English) is negative: if people really enjoy French films, why shouldn't they have them well translated, or not translated at all? The name Couscous is sort of OK I suppose, but The Secret of the Grain? What planet are we on? La Graine certainly refers to couscous, but le mulet refers to the fish mullet, the 'couscous au poisson' meal, so why not try and make that clear? Translations exasperate me, which is why I listen to French films in the original language without subtitles: all right, perhaps I'm privileged to be able to do so, but misinterpretations or misunderstandings abound where French culture is concerned. Enough.

Similarly – oddly, by coincidence, or entirely by design, as with Kechiche's L'Equive – this movie is full of physical or verbal avoidances, distractions, swerves, dodges, call them what you will. Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares) is a sixty-one-year-old ship repairer who has worked for the same company for 35 years, although he's obviously ageing and redundancy calls. He no longer lives with his wife Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk) but with Latifa (Hatika Karaoui) and her daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi), who treats him more as a daughter than a step-daughter. But Slimane also has two biological daughters – Olfa (Sabrina Ouazani) and Karima (Faridah Benkhetache) – and two biological sons – Riadh (Mohamed Benabdeslem), and Majid (Sami Zitouni). And extended family gatherings around the table are the norm, a time of happiness no matter what may be behind the scenes.

Majid is first encountered on a tourist trip around Sète, where this film is mainly set: he screws a woman on the trip, leaving another announcer to make do as best she can. This is the egotistal Majid, who towards the end of the film will leave everyone in a kind a limbo, a situation of avoidance, which perhaps leads to the death of his father. Mercifully, we don't know.

Being made redundant as a ship restorer, Slimane has avoided losing face by setting up a really odd retirement plan: creating a restaurant on the harbour of Sète in a restored ship, serving couscous au poisson as its speciality. But on the grand opening ceremony there's no couscous because Slimane's son Madji – the one with the wandering cock – has seen a potentially very compromising situation with a woman he's screwed, so he avoids things and drives away: with the cooked couscous in the boot. What to do? Get the guests pissed while they wait (a clever avoidance mechanism) and as for Rhm belly-dancing for ages to cause distraction, well: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and obviously Abdellatif Kechichice had his reasons to get Hafsia Herzi to put on so much weight, but I still loved the film.

Abdellatif Kechiche's L'Esquive | Games of Love and Chance (2005)

 

L'Esquive is called Games of Love and Chance in English, an avoidance of the real name: 'L'Esquive' here is best translated as 'Avoidance',  which is really what the film is about. Certainly we can argue that the mise en abyme, the play within the film – Marivaux's Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard, of which the English name is a literal translation – is also principally about a kind of avoidance, but we'll come to that later.

L'Esquive is set in several working-class HLM areas of 93 (Seine-Saint-Denis), a département high in immigration, social problems, etc. But unlike, say, La Haine or Deephan, Abdellatif Kechiche doesn't concentrate on violence or gang culture, but on the ordinary lives and loves of a group of adolescent students. There is a notable scene of realistic violence with a hand-held camera in which the police search the cooperative kids, but that is all: certainly there's a great deal of verbal violence, but that in part acts as an illustration not only of the frustrations of adolescence but of the use of the language of the kids. They speak FCC, or 'Français contemporain des cités'.

FCC is a variety of French which changes frequently to stay in fashion with itself, and is noted for its use of verlan or backslang, itself a word in verlan (l'envers, or even, perhaps, langue verte (meaning 'slang')): louche becomes chelou, mec keum, flic keuf, etc: there are hundreds of such examples of verlan, all in fact a kind of avoidance of conventional French. Even esquiver itself is 'verlanised' to vesqui. FCC goes much further than this though, such as the altering of word forms: là in regular French changes from an adverb of place ('there') to an adverb of time ('now'), the adjective grave ('serious') becomes an adverb ('extremely'), and can even be a gesture of agreement, and so on. Words from other countries can reflect multiculturalism, such as the Arabic kiffe ('love'),  zaama ('so-called'), inchallah (lit. 'God willing'), wallah ('I really mean it'); or Anglicisms such as 'kiss', 'lol', 'cool', 'fun', or 'Miss'.

Returning to Marivaux's play, written nearly 300 years ago, this is being put on by the class as an end-of-term activity. Naturally, the language comes over as strained, rhetorical and unnecessarily polite, but there are of course universals at work here, and the playing of love games is the most obvious one. Sylvia's father intends her to marry Dorante, the son of a friend of his, and because she's alarmed by the prospect of marrying someone she's never seen, she has her father agree to her changing roles with her servant Lisette in order to observe Dorante from a distance: a kind of avoidance tactic, as it were. However, unbeknown to Sylvia and Lisette, Dorante has had the same avoidance idea and swaps roles with his servant Arlequin.

Oh, the film itself. Krimo (Osman Elkharraz) is a kid in the lycée who lives in an HLM with his mother, his father is in prison for an unknown offence, and he has been with his girlfriend Magalie (Aurélie Ganito) for two years. But then he takes a good look at Lydia (Sara Forestier), and the camera moves in on her face in two close-up shots, the second just on her lips, and it's as if the camera is revealing the mind of Krimo: wholly smitten, Magalie is the past and Lydia the future. Well, in Krimo's dreams.

So suddenly Krimo really feels he must play the part of Arlequin in the class performance of Marivaux's play, because Rachid (Rachid Hami playing Dorante playing Arlequin) plays opposite Lydia (playing Sylvia playing Lisette): see? Easy stuff to understand, although the FCC may be difficult for some, vas-y (meaning 'OK' in this case, but in youth language by no means always).

Obviously, Krimo bribes Rachid out of the Arlelquin role and moves in on Lydia. Or rather, not: Krimo has his own psychological avoidance mechanisms: he's painfully shy and gets hopelessly tongue-tied, not only when speaking normally but especially when speaking to Lydia or talking the 'foreign' language of Marivaux, much as he might shun his friends and try to learn the part of Dorante (playing Arlequin). He is, of course, as hopeless at learning an eighteenth-century play as he is trying to woo the beautiful Lydia, who avoids any move he attempts to make towards her. But then, such is the game. This is a superlative, and very clever, very complicated, masterpiece which had many French people tied up in its knots. Mortel, fracassant !