Games of Love and Chance, directed and co-written by Abdel Kechiche, is more about the vernacular use of language than story or character. The language here—somewhat awkwardly subtitled into American pseudo-ghetto slang—is that of teenagers in a low class housing project outside of Paris. Individuals, cliques, groups, and classmates meet, greet, spar, argue, and pass the time, and each scene is directed and written with a maximum amount of focus on the round-about rhythms, repetitions, preening, and acting that takes place in each and every interaction between the kids.

This would come off as an ethnographic docu-drama if the director didn’t overtly structure a dialectic between the teenagers’ social world and that of a play a number of them are performing in class, a giddy 18th century farce by Marivaux where the rich masquerade as the poor and visa-versa all in the name of love. The clear-cut, energetic and enthusiastic characters in the play are a far cry from the sullen Krimo (Osman Elkharraz), who is dumped by his long time girlfriend at the film’s start and nearly immediately falls for childhood friend Lydia (Sara Forestier). In classical fashion, Krimo joins the play in which Lydia has the lead part, in the hope of being closer to her and eventually asking her out. But the social life of the projects stands in his way, and the biggest difference between Marivaux’s play and Krimo’s life is that these teenagers are at the cross-roads of identity-creation, and most are a confused, ambiguous mess of feeling and motivations. Thus, we learn that Krimo and his ex have a history of breaking up and getting back together, and if his ex still has feelings for him even after dumping Krimo, does he still love her? Why did they break up? Does Lydia lead Krimo on merely as part of her diva-like power trip of starring in a play and directing the amateur Krimo? Is Krimo’s best friend’s attempt to first get Krimo back with his ex, and then later to define once and for all his dating status motivated for Krimo, for one of the girls, for himself, or for his crew? Kechiche answers no questions; the characters, though rooted realistically in the vernacular, accented slang of everyday life and similarly radiating the kind of strongly arresting, one-note social acting common to teenagers, are merely sketches. Elkhazzar, as Krimo for example, barely changes inflection, tone, or his face through the whole film, and with him, and especially with Forestier’s Lydia, the director is obviously playing the kids’ unreadable social masks for the purpose of social insight, but after a while the effect is mostly that of making the characters all look one dimensional.

Their interactions are initially fascinating in the amount of time the film devotes to observing endless confrontations where there is a lot of talking, yelling, swearing, and accusations but little is said and even less resolved. Once the pattern is set, however, Kechiche fails to deviate away from these interactions-going-nowhere until a crucial moment of socio-political criticism towards the film’s end, where a squad of policeman question, hassle, and arrest a number of the teenagers in a brilliant scene which is just as circuitous, narrative and subject free and seemingly pointless as most of the interactions in Games of Love and Chance. There is too strong a contrast between the seemingly irrelevant 18th century play and the kid’s lives, a contrast so strong that one begins to see familiarities in the use of language and posturing aspects of the lovey-dovey recreated play scenes and the “who’d you call a slut?” fights throughout the projects. It is actually quite possible that Kechiche’s initially striking decision to film this ethnic, urban subculture as a social study is in fact negated by his own script’s use of Marivaux, where both merely prove that artists, in their time, like to produce entertaining works of social importance that seem up-to-the-minute in their topicality but in the long run just make broad, essentially unchanging insights into human social behavior. Luckily, Kechiche’s sense of teenage behavior, both in the way they talk to each other and the way they front themselves among others, is spot-on. But since Kechiche makes clear that we are mostly here to see how the kids behave and not to follow a story, the films runs out of steam about halfway through when one picks up the ritualistic pattern of conversations, which fail to the vary much. Stuck talking to themselves rather than the few adults around them (Krimo’s mother, the acting teacher, the police), what Games of Love and Chance has to say after its first hour dwindles very quickly.