Meticcio

This is one of my all time favorites. It has a quirky charm that belies its deeper exploration of economic and ethnic prejudice, and portrays three people's hard journey through modern France's social system on their way to being an oddball kind of family. Kassovitz does a marvelous turn as both star and director, creating both sympathy and disgust for both male protagonists as they wend their way through a truly comic and complicated emotional roller-coaster. It's one of the few movies that treats a love triangle with a compassionate eye, without becoming mawkishly sentimental or overly clinical. Also features a great early performance by a young Vincent Cassel as the wayward older brother.

It's worth a look, esp. if you like Beineix or Jeunet!

I wanted to make an enthusiastic recommendation for Café Au Lait, otherwise known as Métisse, a 1993 Franco-Belgian production written and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (who did La Haine (Hate)). Kassovitz mostly explores overlapping ethnic and religious communities in modern France, and in Café Au Lait he throws them all into a very amusing and occasionally serious conflict: Muslim, Jew, Christian, black, white, native-born and immigrant. Lola (played by the adorable Julie Mauduech) is a biracial Christian with two boyfriends, one a slightly thuggish ne'er-do-well hip-hop aficionado from a poor neighborhood (Kassovitz himself, playing the Jew, Félix) and the other a refined, educated diplomat (Hubert Koundé, playing the nominally Muslim Jamal). When Lola is pregnant, she refuses to disclose which one the father is, and it becomes a slightly predictable but very nicely executed relationship comedy. Particularly good are the illustrations of contemporary French life that don't usually appear on screen.

Such a lot of yelling and screaming to so little effect: that's what we have in Métisse, a dry run for La Haine which appeared a couple of years later. Same three actors--Kassovitz, Koundé and Cassel--joined by a gorgeous woman named Julie Mauduech, and the same racial and religious strife that I found so tiresome in the latter film. I don't need to be hit over the head by the dialog, I get it.

Lola is pregnant, and keeping Jamal and Felix on tenterhooks as they try to guess who the father is. The comic moments, as the director tried to set them up, are just not funny. Only Julie Mauduech, who reminds me a little of Dorothy Dandridge at times, and Gauguin's Tahitian women too, is worth watching.

Literally and figuratively, one of the freshest, most original French releases of the Ô90s, this liberated and intriguing cultural comedy scores on every front. Felix (Mathieu Kassovitz) is a surly, hapless Jewish bicycle courier. Jamal (Hubert Koundi) is a rich, pampered black Muslim studying at the university. Both young men are involved with Indian beauty Lola (Julie Mauduech) who turns up pregnant. She wants to have the baby, and decides to indefinitely postpone choosing between the two men. When the two find out about each other, they initially clash, but later realize they must cooperate in order to nurse Lola through her pregnancy. They all shack up together, and await the baby. Mathieu Kassovitz has been called the Jewish Spike Lee because of his vibrant, kinetic visual style, and indeed the film seems to owe a bit to SHEÕS GOTTA HAVE IT, but Kassovitz has enough of his own creativity to carry things through in a unique way. He fashions a quirky, realistic, strikingly filmed story, underscored by some undeniably ballsy French hip-hop music. A real winner.

While this was a pretty good movie, especially with the amusing foreign euphemisms, it really had a lot of racial and religious stereotyping that could have been avoided. The stereotypes did not add any comedy and seemed irrelevant to the plot.