“L’ESQUIVE” WINS CESAR

Omar Elkharraz plays a young Arab boy from a French housing project who tries out for the school play in order to get closer to a girl (played by Sara Forestier, seen below), in L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance).

L’Esquive, a small-budget drama about alienated youth in a French suburb, was the surprise winner at France’s top film awards, the Cesars, on Saturday night, scooping up the coveted award for best French film of 2004, and the best director Cesar for its helmer, Tunisia-born Abdellatif Kechiche, who has lived in France since the age of six.

“As described in the program notes for the forthcoming New Directors/New Films festival, which will screeen the film on March 31 and April 3, “The film’s title comes from a fencing term meaning the quick move to avoid an opponent’s blade, deflect a thrust, and get out of harm’s way — something its teenage protagonist, Krimo (Omar Elkharraz), does not do. After their long friendship, Krimo recognizes his love for the feisty and determined Lydia (Sara Forestier), and even though he has scarcely cracked a book in two years, he maneuvers his way into the school play in which Lydia stars.”

According to the International Herald Tribune, Kechiche had been “trying to make L’Esquive [-- which was filmed in Saint-Denis and Bobigny, northeast of Paris, in the heartland of highrises --] for 12 years, with a script that evolved, and was reworked, and finally resembles the finished project: ‘I wanted to talk about the theater, and to make a love story, to talk of the suburbs in a different way, without the stories of forced marriages or the headscarf debate,’ a reference to a controversial proposal to ban Muslin headscarves in French public schools.’”

The kids featured in the film, “who were about 14 at the time the movie was made, talk their own language, a hectic, Arabic-accented ‘verlan,’ or salty French slang that sounds like rap. They also speak the 18th-century French of [Pierre] Marivaux, when they rehearse ‘Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard,’ their high school play to be performed at the end of the year.”

New Yorker Films picked up L’Esquive at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, where it screened in the Panorama, and will release it as Games of Love and Chance later this fall.
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