General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Games of Love and Chance

Games of Love and Chance (French: L'Esquive) is a 2003 French comedy-drama directed by Abdellatif Kechiche in which teenagers from a Parisian housing project rehearse Pierre Carlet de Marivaux's 1730 play Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard while acting out parallel love games of their own.¹^•² The film won four César Awards in 2005, including Best Film and Best Director, and established Kechiche, previously known for his Venice-awarded debut La Faute à Voltaire (2000), as a major figure in French cinema.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title	L'Esquive, a French slang expression meaning to dodge, back out of something, or con⁵
Director and writers	Abdellatif Kechiche (director, screenplay), with Ghalya Lacroix co-credited on the script¹
Source play	Marivaux's Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard (1730), rehearsed by the characters within the film²
Principal cast	Osman Elkharraz (Krimo), Sara Forestier (Lydia), Sabrina Ouazani (Frida), Carole Franck (the French teacher)⁶
Release	Produced 2003; French theatrical release 7 January 2004; CNC visa dated 28 October 2003 with a registered duration of 125 minutes⁷^•¹
César Awards 2005	Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Most Promising Actress (Sara Forestier)³
Critical scores	Metascore 71 (generally favorable, from 8 critic reviews); IMDb 6.9/10 from about 3,400 votes⁸^•⁹

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The story is set in a cité HLM, a subsidized housing block, in the Parisian suburbs, largely around the Franc-Moisin estate in Seine-Saint-Denis.¹⁰ Abdelkrim, called Krimo, is a shy 15-year-old who lives with his mother, a supermarket employee, while his father is in prison; he dreams of sailing around the world.¹¹ At school, a French teacher (Carole Franck) is rehearsing scenes from Marivaux's Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard with the class for an end-of-term performance.¹²^•¹³

Krimo falls for his classmate Lydia, a talkative girl cast in the play, who is so attached to her role that she walks around the estate in her servant costume with brocade and lace.¹¹^•¹² To get close to her, Krimo, who initially belonged to the group of theater-averse friends, secretly bargains to take over the role of Arlequin from his classmate Rachid, even trading his prized possessions, including a pair of sneakers and a car radio.¹²^•¹⁴ The scheme fails: the size of the text and the work required defeat him, and Lydia is not impressed.¹⁴^•¹⁵

The film contains six sequences devoted to scenes from the Marivaux play, interleaved with the teenagers' daily life in the estate.¹⁶

Production and style

Non-professional cast. Kechiche cast non-professional young actors for his second feature, after using more established performers in La Faute à Voltaire.⁴ The film was shot in mini DV with these non-professional actors, and the young cast's performances were widely praised; Sara Forestier received the César for Most Promising Actress, and Osman Elkharraz and Sabrina Ouazani were nominated in the same promising-actor categories.¹⁷^•¹⁸

The crew included cinematographer Lubomir Bakchev, editor Ghalya Lacroix, costume designer Maria Beloso-Hall, and composer Antoine Banville, with Jacques Ouaniche as delegate producer for Lola Films.⁶ Kechiche was born in Tunisia in 1960, moved to Nice at age six, worked as an actor through the 1980s and early 1990s, and turned to directing after his scripts found no takers; La Faute à Voltaire won the Lion of the Future for best first film at the 2000 Venice Film Festival.¹⁹

The directing style favors long takes shot entirely on location, which critics found gave the film an authentic feel even as the teenagers spoke dialogue nearly 300 years old.⁸ Le Monde described a film "modeled by discourse," built to the extreme yet giving the constant impression of catching reality in flight, with long elastic scenes that stretch with each character's speeches.¹⁰

Language as the film's subject

The film's central device is the collision of two language registers: the eighteenth-century classical French of Marivaux and the street slang (tchatche, langage de banlieue) of the teenagers, a mix of French with Arabic expressions and invented slang.²⁰^•⁴ Scholars have read the juxtaposition as questioning the divide between high and popular culture, and as giving dramatic function to the shifts among three codes: the banlieue sociolect, the standard French of the school, and the classical variety of the play.²⁰^•²¹

Kechiche refused to subtitle the slang. When audiences reported not understanding the non-standard dialogue, he replied that well-to-do, middle-class Parisians needed to acknowledge that they "live in a little world that is actually quite small," and that more people speak the variety depicted than they care to think.²² The language also generated public debate in France: at a packed post-screening discussion in Saint-Denis days after the release, residents argued over the characters' coarse speech, while a young woman from the Franc-Moisin estate where the film was shot defended it as representing contemporary life.²³

Place in banlieue cinema

The film is associated with the film de banlieue and beur cinema traditions, which since the mid-1980s have portrayed immigrant and marginalized populations underrepresented in French film.²⁰^•²⁴ Critics initially compared it to La Haine (1995), État des lieux (1995), and Petits Frères (1999), but reviewers noted that it broke with the genre's usual repertoire of police confrontations, delinquency, and drugs, showing banlieue youth without an external political or sociological filter.²⁵^•²⁶ The FIPRESCI critic Rüdiger Suchsland wrote that making a film about the banlieue without stigmatizing it, without reducing it to drugs, crime, and cultural conflict, is already a political act, and read it as part of a reversal in which third-generation directors of Maghrebi descent moved beyond identity and immigration conflicts as their only subjects.⁵

Reception and awards

The film was named Best Film, Best Director, Best Script, and Best Female Newcomer at the 2005 Césars, and its success there led to a second French theatrical release.³^•²⁵ On the festival circuit it won the FIPRESCI Prize and a Special Prize of the Jury for ensemble acting at the 2004 Istanbul Film Festival, the Jury Prize and Holden Award for Best Script at the 2004 Turin Film Festival, a Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Buenos Aires festival, and honors at Stockholm and Mons, where Forestier, Ouazani, and Nanou Benhamou shared a Best Actress award.¹⁸^•¹

Anglophone critics were broadly favorable: the film scored 71 on Metacritic, with six positive and two mixed reviews out of eight, and no negative reviews.⁸ The Village Voice praised it as a highly intelligent comedy that documents teenage moodiness without seeking to shock, while The New York Times called it a graceful look at how teenage lives intersect with a work of literature; The Hollywood Reporter found the execution somewhat lacking despite a rich premise.⁸

Kechiche repeated the feat soon after: his next film, La Graine et le mulet (2006), won exactly the same César categories as L'Esquive, and he went on to direct La Vie d'Adèle (2013), which won the Palme d'Or.³^•²⁷

Notes on the title and runtime

The French title L'Esquive carries a double meaning: as a slang term it means to dodge or back out, and in the film it names both dodging a kiss or a love affair and escaping a blow or a hurt; the noun did not exist in Marivaux's time.⁵^•¹⁰^•¹⁶ Runtime listings differ across databases: 117 minutes (MovieMeter, the Festival des 3 Continents notes), 1h57 (LaCinetek, AlloCiné), 124 minutes (JustWatch), and 125 minutes on the CNC visa record.¹⁵^•⁶^•⁹^•⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026