When the Franco-Tunisian film director Abdel-Latif Kechiche won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year for his film La Vie d'Adèle, it came as an important vote of confidence in the work of a still comparatively young director — Kechiche has only been directing films professionally for the last 10 years — and sealed his reputation as a leading figure in the crop of French film directors of Arab origin who have been revolutionising the industry over recent years. Kechiche's film, three hours long and dealing with non-conventional subject-matter, was in competition against some formidable competitors including films by established directors Steven Soderberg, Ethan and Joel Coen, Roman Polanski, Paolo Sorrentino and Jia Zhangke. Yet, it was his film, made with a modest budget and featuring two young and unknown French actresses and a largely non-professional cast, that caught the eye of the festival's jury, presided over by US director Steven Spielberg. Speaking after the award of the festival's most important prize to Kechiche in Cannes in May, Spielberg said that “the film is a great love story that made all of us feel like we were privileged to be flies on the wall, to be invited into this story of deep love and deep heartbreak. The director did not put any constraints on the narrative and we were absolutely spellbound by the amazing performances of the two actresses… Kechiche is an incredibly observant and sensitive film maker.” At the time that the award was made there were worries that the length of Kechiche's film and its possibly challenging subject-matter — the film deals with a relationship between two young women — could stymie its distribution abroad, notably in the United States. However, since then other concerns have emerged in the French press having to do with Kechiche's working methods and his possible exploitation of his cast, these having to an extent even overshadowed the film's release in France earlier this month. In an interview that Kechiche gave to the French magazine Télérama in September, he said that he had been unable to understand the allegations made about his supposedly tyrannical working methods by one of the film's two lead actresses, Léa Seydoux, who had described the experience of making the film as a “trial” and had declared that she would not work with Kechiche again. “These statements,” Kechiche said, “are worse than poisoning the wells. They show a complete lack of respect for a profession that I consider to be sacred. When I read what she said, I was at a loss to understand. If she had really gone through what she said she had, why did she come to Cannes and spend her time thanking me, walking on red carpets, and trying on new outfits? What job does she think she's doing — is she an actress or is she a festival prima donna?” As a result, he went on, “the film should not now be released. It has been ruined. The Palme d'Or was a moment of intense happiness, but now I feel humiliated, rejected, as if I were living under some kind of curse.” Thankfully, on this occasion the director's wishes were not respected, and the film was released as planned to appreciative reactions from French audiences. However, the controversy surrounding the film — both regarding its non-conventional subject-matter and the allegations made by at least one of its cast members — may nevertheless have had the unfortunate effect of drawing attention away from the remarkable career of its director and the true importance of his films.
FROM TUNISIA TO FRANCE: Born in Tunisia in 1960, Kechiche went to France when he was six years old in order to live with his family in Nice. He studied drama in Antibes, making his debut as a stage actor at the end of the 1970s before being cast in a series of mostly stereotypical roles in films made in the 1980s. While some of these undoubtedly helped to extend the subject matter of the French cinema of the time, it is hard to believe that Kechiche, a far more versatile actor than such roles generally gave him credit for, did not feel frustrated by the limited opportunities available to him as an Arab actor in France. In 1985, he played Hamou in director Abdel-Krim Bahloul's film Le Thé à la menthe, a film exploring the lives of young Algerian immigrants in France living off petty crime, and in 1987 he was cast as a gigolo in André Techiné's film Les Innocents, reprising the role in Nouri Bouzid's 1991 film Bezness. For his role in the latter film, Kechiche won the Best Actor prize at the 1992 Namur Film Festival and a certain amount of professional recognition. Yet, while Bouzid's film, the first in a series by European directors about European sex tourism in the developing world, was seen as an important and challenging film at the time, the fact remains that in his career as an actor Kechiche seems to have been unable to break out of the structural constraints of the French film industry, which presented male North African actors as either criminals or the objects of illicit desire. It is against this background that L'Esquive, Kechiche's first major film as a director, must be judged. In a similar way to the director's later triumph at Cannes in 2013 with his La Vie d'Adèle, when L'Esquive was entered in the competition for the 2004 César Awards, a French version of the American Oscars, it was seen as an outlier, an obscure low-budget film by a largely unknown director. However, to the surprise of the critics the film won the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress awards at that year's ceremony, pushing aside safer heritage fare from directors Christophe Barratier (Les Choristes) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Un long dimanche de fiançailles). Watching L'Esquive again some 10 years later and in the context of Kechiche's subsequent win at Cannes, it is possible to detect some common themes. In this film, scripted by Kechiche himself in collaboration with Ghalia Lacroix, a group of teenagers from a deprived suburb of Paris rehearse a play, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard (The Game of Love and Chance), by the 18th century French dramatist Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, as part of their French class at school, eventually performing the piece to an appreciative parental audience. One of the teenagers, Abdel-Krim, or Krimo, marvellously played by Osman Al-Kharraz, volunteers for the role of Harlequin in the play in order to get closer to Lydia (Sarah Forestier), cast as Lisette. While he does not succeed in seducing Lydia in his role as Harlequin in Marivaux's play, Al-Kharraz's performance as Krimo in Kechiche's film successfully draws attention to the contrasts between the world of this 18th century playwright, reminiscent of the fêtes galantes of Watteau and Boucher and the frivolous court culture of Versailles during the reign of Louis XV, and the lives of the teenagers on the Paris estates. Put this way, the film sounds programmatic, like a somewhat heavy-handed illustration of the undoubtedly enormous gulf that exists between France's deprived young people and the country's official culture, memorialised in the works of classical authors such as Marivaux and the examinations of the French school system. However, in fact the film suggests that there may be ways of overcoming even this gulf through the creative appropriation of the classical material, when and if this can be made to chime with youthful aspirations. Some of the discussion of the film at the time focussed on a scene towards the end when the teenagers, taken as delinquents by the police, are brutally searched, presumably for drugs, by members of the local gendarmerie. The scene starkly illustrates the gulf between the young people on France's troubled housing estates and the representatives of law and order, a gulf that came to international attention a year after the release of Kechiche's film when rioting broke out in the suburbs around many of France's larger cities. As if to point up the connection between cultural and economic forms of exclusion, one of the policemen pounces on a copy of Le Jeu de l'amour et du hazard that he finds on one of the teenagers, refusing to believe that she could really be reading it. However, when watching the film again perhaps what strikes the viewer most are the rehearsals that take place in the school in preparation for the performance of Marivaux's play. School scenes in Kechiche's films tend to be slightly idealised, though not excessively so, in line with the standard French view that schools can function as a kind of sanctuary, an outpost of the state and middle class, in an otherwise dangerous and chaotic environment. As the pupils rehearse an extract from act two of Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, Krimo failing to convince in the role of Harlequin as a result of his difficulty with the playwright's 18th century language, their teacher draws attention to the finely graded social hierarchies that make up the texture of Marivaux's play. Love, she reminds them, like life, is part game, part chance and part destiny. Harlequin in his beautiful costume plays his part in the aristocratic household of his employer, and though he may entertain he can never escape his position in the social hierarchy. Playing a part and assuming a role, the teacher says, in the perfumed world of Marivaux as much as in the present world of the film, has a theatrical aspect — a matter of modes of speech and forms of dress and bearing — that irresistibly reveals and expresses the social origins and background of the player. “Ah Madame,” Krimo says, playing the role of Harlequin, “j'allais vous dire de belles choses, et je n'en trouverai plus que de communes à cette heure, hormis mon amour qui est extraordinaire; mais, à propos de mon amour, quand est-ce que le vôtre lui tiendra compagnie?” (I was going to say such beautiful things to you, and now that I come to it, I can't find anything but commonplaces, even though my love is out of the ordinary. When are you going to love me as I love you?) Lydia, cast as Lisette, replies that “il faut esperer que cela viendra… souvenez-vous qu'on n'est pas les maîtres de son sort” (You have to hope that that will come… remember that we do not choose our situation in life.) The scene is a reminder of how carefully scripted Kechiche's films are, despite the air of spontaneity and improvisation that is a feature of them.
LA VIE D'ADÈLE: Kechiche's new film has the same documentary character as his earlier ones, its length recalling his 2007 film La Graine et le mulet, and it is set in a bleak, apparently socially mixed but nevertheless nondescript area of northern France. Adèle, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, has trimmed her aspirations to her social origins, hoping to become a primary school teacher. However, when she meets Emma, played by Léa Seydoux, a student at a local art college who has an altogether different vision of life, these aspirations are called into question. Among the links between this film and Kechiche's earlier ones, most obviously L'Esquive, is the focus on education as a vocation and an exit route, with formal schooling functioning as an outlet for otherwise unrealisable aspirations even if this outlet is, in point of fact, often blocked. However, even more striking is the emphasis on social differences and their determining character in moulding personal aspirations and later life-chances. “One of the most important themes in all my films,” Kechiche told interviewers when the film was released, “is the question of social justice and how one is to understand social difference. Perhaps it is because I myself belong to the class from which Adèle comes, the proletariat, that the film is so attentive to this question.” “Emma, on the other hand, comes from the intellectual and artistic elite. But each of my heroines is born into her own social world, and the whole difficulty of their relationship comes from the social differences that give rise to different personal aspirations. It is this that leads to the break between the two, and it is this that the film describes.” Despite the controversy surrounding La Vie d'Adèle, the film has been well received in France, and despite Kechiche's own reluctance to see the film released in the wake of the media reports that in his view had “sullied” it, it can only reinforce his reputation as one of France's most important contemporary filmmakers. Perhaps because of his own early experiences as an actor, being typecast in films that, while in some cases important and in others at least well-meaning, did little to modify the ways in which France's racial and other minorities have been portrayed by the country's film industry, Kechiche has tended to shy away from the explicit thematisation of such questions, while at the same time finding it impossible to avoid them. The social content of Kechiche's films, the search for new subject matter and the readiness to jettison traditional pieties have made the director a significant figure in the French film industry, a status that has now been reinforced by his consecration at Cannes and heightened international exposure. Kechiche has also emerged as a leading figure in the clutch of French filmmakers of Arab origin who have been responsible for much of the renovation of French cinema in recent years, among them Rachid Bouchareb, born in 1959 and of Algerian origin, whose film Indigènes (Natives) was in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, eventually winning the Best Actor award. Indigènes tells the story of the more than 600,000 North African soldiers, most of them Algerian, who fought for France during World War II, a story developed further in the same director's 2010 film Hors-la-loi (Outlaws), which gave rise to controversy in France because of its presentation of the colonial period in Algeria. While Kechiche has been less polemical than Bouchareb, his films have proved equally controversial. Bouchareb has sought to use his films as a way of reminding audiences of the realities of French colonial rule in North Africa and the Arab world. For Kechiche, it appears that social and sexual differences are best explored through the lived experience of the characters (in La Vie d'Adèle), while issues of social, generational and geographical exclusion can be investigated through the possibly unlikely vehicle of a school production of Marivaux.
