Teenagers argue over life and love in award-winning GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE
CINÉSALON: GAMES OF LOVE AND CHANCE (L’ESQUIVE) (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2003)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 20, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening introduced by Nicolas Bouchaud)
Series continues through October 27
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema” continues October 20 with Abdellatif Kechiche’s poignant 2003 drama, Games of Love and Chance. Winner of the César Award for Best Film, Best Director, Best Writing (Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix), and Most Promising Actress (Sara Forestier), the film follows a group of teenagers, mostly of North African descent, in the housing projects of Seine-Saint-Denis as their everyday lives intersect with the play that is being put on in their French literature class, Marivaux’s 1730 romantic comedy, The Game of Love and Chance. In the class play, Forestier is Lydia, a bit of a diva who is portraying Lisette, a maid posing as a wealthy woman, opposite the always loud and angry Frida (Sabrina Ouazani), who is Silvia, a wealthy woman pretending to be a maid. Rachid (Rachid Hami) is initially Arlequin, but he is bribed out of the role by Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), who desperately wants to get close to Lydia. However, he has no real interest in acting, and no talent, which upsets their teacher (Carole Franck), who is looking forward to staging a quality show. Krimo’s pursuit of Lydia also creates more problems with his on-again, off-again longtime girlfriend, Magali (Aurélie Ganito), who believes the two are destined to be together no matter what. And when Krimo’s best friend, Fathi (Hafet Ben-Ahmed), gets involved, things threaten to get explosive. Kechiche, who also won the César for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for The Secret of the Grain and the Palme d’Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour, explores class distinction, teenage awkwardness, and artistic expression in the film, which is shot by Lubomir Bakchev primarily with a handheld camera and features powerful performances by the young cast. The differences between the language spoken in Marivaux’s play and the slang of the boys and girls in the hood can be a bit much at times, and the English subtitles are almost ridiculously outdated and stagy, but you’ll get used to it. Kechiche clearly has an eye for new talent; three of his five films featured young women who went on to win the César for Most Promising Actress (Forestier in Games of Love and Chance, Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain, and Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue Is the Warmest Colour). Games of Love and Chance is screening in Florence Gould Hall on October 20 at 4:00 and 7:30; the later show will be introduced by actor and director Nicolas Bouchaud, who starred in The Exercise Was Beneficial, Sir at FIAF in May 2014. The series, highlighting films about theater, concludes October 27 with François Truffaut’s The Last Metro.
The related concepts of time and reality wind through Olivier Assayas’s beautifully poetic, melancholy Clouds of Sils Maria much like actual snakelike clouds slither through the twisting Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, as life imitates art and vice versa. Juliette Binoche stars as Maria Enders, a famous French actress who is on her way to Zurich to accept an award for her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who eschews such mundane ceremonies. But while en route, Maria and her personal assistant, the extremely attentive and capable Valentine (Kristen Stewart), learn that Wilhelm has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and Maria considers turning back, especially when she later finds out that Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), an old nemesis, will be there to pay homage to Wilhelm as well, but she decides to go ahead after all. At a cocktail party, Maria meets with hot director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who is preparing a new stage production of Wilhelm and Maria’s first big hit, The Maloja Snake, but this time Maria would play Helena, an older woman obsessed with ambitious eighteen-year-old Sigrid, the role she originally performed twenty years earlier, to great acclaim. Klaus is planning to cast Lindsay Lohan-like troublemaking star and walking tabloid headline Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid, which does not thrill Maria as her past and present meld together in an almost dreamlike narrative punctuated by the music of Handel and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous shots of vast mountain landscapes.
Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir is a long, talky French movie about very beautiful, very complicated, sex-crazed men and women — and it just might be the master filmmaker’s crowning glory, a magnificent masterpiece that deserved its slot as the New York Film Festival’s opening night selection back in 2001. This erotically charged, very funny drama is set around a traveling theater company’s return to Paris to put on Pirandello’s As You Desire Me in the original Italian. Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), the director and costar of the play, is romantically involved with Camille (Jeanne Balibar), the lead actress, who visits her former lover Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), a philosopher with a thing for Heidegger, who is now living with Sonia (Marianne Basler), a dance instructor who is being chased by Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a ne’er-do-well whose half sister, Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), has taken a liking to Ugo and offers to help him find an unpublished ghost play by Carlo Goldini, which her mother (Catherine Rouvel) just might have. Every minute of this film is pure magic, and at the center of it all is the fantastique Camille, an instinctual, graceful actress whom everyone — men and women — fall in love with, played by the fantastique, instinctual, graceful Balibar, whom audiences will fall in love with as well. French film enthusiasts should watch for Claude Berri in a small role. Lovingly photographed by William Lubtchansky and edited by his wife, Nicole Lubtchansky, Va Savoir is screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on September 29 in FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema”; the later show will be introduced by Mathieu Bauer. (FIAF is screening the 154-minute version, not the 220-minute director’s cut.) The Tuesday festival continues through October 27 with such other stage-related dramas as Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, and François Truffaut’s The Last Metro.
For his third stage adaptation in ten years, following 1994’s Death and the Maiden and 2011’s Carnage, Roman Polanski created a marvelous, multilayered examination of the intricate nature of storytelling, consumed with aspects of doubling. David Ives’s Tony-nominated play, 
It’s rather hard to tell how much Japanese auteur Nagisa Ôshima is monkeying around with his very strange 1986 movie, Max, Mon Amour, a love story between an intelligent, beautiful woman and a chimpanzee. The director of such powerful films as Cruel Story of Youth; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence; Taboo; and In the Realm of the Senses seems to have lost his own senses with this surprisingly straightforward, tame tale of bestiality, a collaboration with master cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot seminal works by Truffaut and Godard; screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who has written or cowritten nearly ninety films by such directors as Pierre Étaix (who plays the detective in Max), Luis Buñuel, Volker Schlöndorff, Philippe Garrel, and Miloš Forman; and special effects and makeup artist extraordinaire Rick Baker, the mastermind behind the 1976 King Kong, the Michael Jackson video Thriller, Ratboy, Hellboy, and An American Werewolf in London, among many others. Evoking Bedtime for Bonzo and Ed more than Planet of the Apes and Gorillas in the Mist, Max, Mon Amour is about a well-to-do English family living in Paris whose lives undergo a rather radical change when husband Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) catches his elegant wife, Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), in bed with a chimp. Margaret insists that she and the chimp, Max, are madly in love and somehow convinces Peter to let her bring the sensitive yet dangerous beast home, which confuses their son, Nelson (Christopher Hovik), and causes their maid, Maria (Victoria Abril), to break out in ugly rashes. Peter, a diplomat, works for the queen of England, so as he prepares for a royal visit to Paris, he also has to deal with this new addition to his ever-more-dysfunctional family.
In 1980, Jean-Luc Godard told journalist Jonathan Cott, “When you have a first love, a first experience, a first movie, once you’ve done it, you can’t repeat it,” the French auteur said about his latest film, Every Man for Himself, which he considered his “second first” film. “If it’s bad, it’s a repetition; if it’s good, it’s a spiral. It’s like when you return home — to mountains and lakes, in my case — you have a feeling of childhood, of beginning again. But in films, it’s very seldom that you have the opportunity to make your first film for the second time.” For Godard, whose real first film was 1960’s Breathless and who went on to make such other avant-garde masterworks as Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine Feminine, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Every Man for Himself might have been somewhat of a return to narrative, but only as Godard can do it. He still plays with form and various technological aspects, including a fascination with slow motion and an unusual, often very funny use of incidental music, and his manner of episodic storytelling would not exactly be called traditional. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s bad. Jacques Dutronc stars as mean-spirited, self-obsessed Swiss television director Paul Godard, who has recently broken up with his girlfriend, Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), who wants to leave their apartment in the city for the idyllic greenery of the country. (Yes, the characters have such names as Godard and Rimbaud, and the voice of Marguerite Duras shows up.) Paul then meets a prostitute, Isabelle Rivière (Isabelle Huppert), who is interested in Paul and Denise’s apartment, planning on bettering her life even as she still must submit to the whims of her clients, including a businessman who orchestrates a strange orgy that would make Secretary’s James Spader proud.