Abdellatif Kechiche's infectiously upbeat take on the perils of adolescence provides a satisfying conclusion to the French Film Festival. Games of Love and Chance is a brief glance into the lives of immigrant youths residing in a Parisian housing project, where poverty and absentee parents are too common for comment. Yet, in vivid contrast to usually bleak portrayals of growing pains -- think Raising Victor Vargas and the recent Kidulthood -- the film is refreshingly free of expected angst.
The tale follows Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), a boy on the quiet side, and the extreme extent to which he pursues a massive crush on Lydia (Sara Forestier), who's both an old friend and the star of the school play.
Elkharraz is, from the start, a wonderfully apt casting choice. He plays the recognizable, inelegant, inconsistent teenage boy so convincingly it is difficult to keep from laughing out loud. Krimo is disembarrassed about being ridiculed before his entire class when he bribes his way into starring opposite Lydia in the play. Yet when she actually confronts him, he hides in his room, too uncertain to answer her calls. Krimo's portrayal is rendered eloquent through his ineloquence.
Krimo doesn't say much, but we're drawn into his perspective through careful camerawork. The lens stays close to him in longer shots, taking tight zoom-ins during conversations. Lydia can be irritating -- she gets into a scream-fest with her friend Frida at rehearsal over precisely who deserves to dominate the scene and, inexplicably, insists on wearing her costume for the play on and off the stage. In Krimo's first scene with her, however, the camera focuses on Lydia's close-up, utterly innocent expression. We instantly see how a young girl prone to poses and grudges can be one boy's mythological siren, who draws him towards literary drama in a way no one else would (his ex, Magalie, humorously exclaims at one point, "he can't read or write!").
While Krimo and his buddy Fathi have to cope with an imprisoned father and uncle respectively, the kids are largely portrayed as removed from adult troubles. They aren't cloistered from the real world, rather, still blissfully immersed in the uncomplicated woes of adolescence. This is where the film's main strength lies -- it avoids playing the dysfunctional card, never wavering from the teenagers' preoccupation with ordinary vanities, jealousies and obsessions. They are all the more likeable for it, and if not likeable, sympathetic -- someone you'd certainly recognize from earlier years.
There's prickly Frida -- always fighting with Lydia though fiercely defensive of her against any outsider -- and street-smart, dependable Nanou, who's perfectly attuned to the dynamics and tantrums between her friends. Fathi offers one of the few moments of un-childlike callousness with his unfair intimidation of Frida, but his reason -- saving Krimo's potentially broken heart -- is so characteristically typical, it provides some of the movie's funniest moments.
The most frightening scene is the one which actually has adults. In an uncomfortably long sequence, Krimo and his friends are accosted and physically harassed by a group of policemen for loitering. Yet by the next scene, they've bounced back, aided by the impenetrable -- if temporary -- shield of youth. An exuberantly realistic picture of adolescence, the world of Games of Love and Chance is hardly a utopia, yet certainly one in which you'd want to stop for a while.
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