French Theatre Today: The View from New York, Paris, and Avignon

9. Cultural Diversity (I): Ethnicities

Hoary notions of culture versus a changed population Just after ACT FRENCH began in New York, I saw a remarkable new French-language film that was showing at the IFC Center near Washington Square: Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive (Games of Love and Chance, 2004). The Tunisian-born Kechiche (b. 1960) would become better known in this country two years later when his next movie, La graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain), became a popular success along the U.S. art-house circuit. L’esquive is a motion picture whose subject matter stayed with me throughout my initial exploration of the French theatre scene. More directly than any Frenchlanguage stage work I would see in the following twelve months, this stunning movie—which had already garnered four Césars (France’s equivalent of Oscars)—treated the thorny and timely issue of whether France’s grand theatre tradition has pertinence for minority youth in today’s Paris suburbs and, by extension, for all French citizens in the years to come. L’esquive deals with a group of multiracial high schoolers whose white French teacher is prepping them for an end-of-year performance of Pierre de Marivaux’s comedy Le jeu de l’amour et du hasard (The Game of Love and Chance, 1730)—a staple of the ComédieFran çaise repertoire and a prize example of France’s vaunted theatrical patrimoine, or legacy from the past. The movie’s most salient trait is the linguistic divide between the refined, precious Enlightenment idiom of Marivaux’s script and the youngsters’ rough, slang- and hiphop -laden street talk. As the story progresses, however, Kechiche cleverly makes us alert to the elaborate artifice—and the lyrical charm— inherent in both ways of speaking. The well-intentioned teacher (played by Carole Franck) labors 8 Prodigious Artists . . . . . 9 Cultural Diversity (I) Ethnicities . . . . . . . . .. 11 A Festival Turns Sixty . . . . . . . . . . Cultural​Diversity​(I):​Ethnicities 221 valiantly to convince her pupils that by performing such archetypal characters as Silvia and Harlequin they will “find pleasure in getting out of themselves.” Yet she holds back from cautioning that unless they acquire a good command of standard modern French, their chances for social mobility are slim. Kechiche’s screenplay perhaps makes a stronger case for Marivaux’s curricular appropriateness simply by exposing multiple parallels between the anxieties and awkward encounters of the playwright’s fictive young lovers and those of the contemporary teens who hang out, flirt, and squabble with one another amid the concrete hallways and plazas of their housing project. Near the film’s end, a sequence of the students’ public performance at the local community center shows the young thespians joyfully acting out their roles to the obvious delight and pride of family and friends. Yet L’esquive is not a naive defense of the often-heard precept, triggered by supposed French republican values, that one cultural canon happily fits and uplifts all. In a chilling anticipation of the police misconduct that allegedly triggered the 2005 suburban riots, Kechiche gives us a powerful sequence—just before that of the Marivaux performance —in which a local police squad stop, search, and strongarm the film’s innocent lead characters without due cause. Moreover , Kechiche’s main male protagonist, the lovesick introvert Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), who was born in France to Algerian parents, is thoroughly resistant to the supposed allure of eighteenth-century prose and dramaturgy. By the film’s close, Krimo’s inability to don the masks of neoclassic French comic theatre leads to his feeling even more alienated from his peers than he had been at the movie’s start. L’esquive thus discloses the inadequacy of the ideal of a wholly shared cultural patrimoine in a nation whose demography is increasingly diverse . In chapter 3 we explored how some of the ideological tensions and paradoxes concerning the fuller recognition of France’s ethnic diversity make themselves felt in three French-language playwrights of African and Caribbean descent or affiliation who were on the roster of the ACT FRENCH festival in New York. In the pages that follow we will examine how several minority theatre makers and show people encountered in Paris have dealt with these same matters, especially through humor. ​ PA R I S 222 An indictment of so-called integration As of early March 2006, you could not take a subway ride in Paris without seeing billboards for Bambi, elle est noire...