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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
"Lila Says": A wildflower grows in the back alleys of Marseille
Ziad Doueiri is patient and polite when you ask him about Quentin Tarantino. Only after talking thoughtfully about his relationship with the indie godhead does the Lebanese-American director permit himself an almost inaudible sigh. "I guess I have to make my own $150 million movie," he says. "Then I can finally stop answering questions about Quentin."
Doueiri became known as one of the most skillful camera operators in the indie-film world for his work on "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown" (among other movies), but what he really wanted to do, as they say, was direct. His sultry erotic drama "Lila Says," starring the impossibly gorgeous Vahina Giocante as a sexually precocious blonde growing up wild in the French port city of Marseille, is only his second film, and his first in six years.
After his well-received first feature, "West Beirut," a memorable tale of growing up amid Lebanon's civil war, Doueiri started putting together an ambitious project about U.S. policy in the Middle East, focusing on a real event of 1991. (He won't tell me exactly what that was.) "We had a producer in France," he says. "We had built about a third of the budget. It was exciting -- we had all this material about secret contacts between Washington, Amman, Damascus, Jerusalem."
Then something happened. To be specific, a couple of buildings in New York fell down, and Doueiri realized that a movie by an Arab-American criticizing U.S. policy wasn't the most marketable idea, and that most American actors would run, not walk, in the opposite direction. Now the production of that film is back on after four years, which is one reason Doueiri is visiting New York. "The war in Iraq has started opening people's eyes," he says. "This taboo subject, I think, may have been opened up."
In the meantime, Doueiri read an anonymous French erotic novel called "Lila dit ça," about a steamy love affair in the Paris slums between an Arab guy and a Polish-French girl. Several European filmmakers had tried to adapt it without success, and Doueiri saw a personal opportunity, a chance "to get away from the United States for a while" after 17 years in and around the film industry in Los Angeles.
"What I liked about the book was that it's trashy," Doueiri says. "It's not a vulgar book, it's trashy. I liked that -- there's no fucking around." To be blunt about it, there's also no fucking; the sex in "Lila Says" is almost entirely, shall we say, oral. Giocante's Lila talks impressively dirty to Chimo (Mohammed Khouas), a sleepy-eyed, caramel-skinned boy she has met on the street, and the inexperienced Chimo, incurably smitten, isn't really sure what to do about it.
"I wanted to exude sexuality through words, not images," says Doueiri. "There are so many movies where you see good sex scenes, especially in French cinema. I wanted to do something where the sex comes out of somebody's mouth and isn't based on people's bodies.
"What interested me, in fact, was how much the oral transmission can affect your body. When you talk dirty, or you tackle a fantasy subject, it can really turn on the other person. I think we've all had that experience, but I didn't know if I could do it in a film. I was scared I would wind up with something that was all talk, and not arousing at all."
Opinions will no doubt vary on how far Doueiri succeeds with "Lila Says," which the filmmaker transposed to the more familiar (to him) Mediterranean surroundings of Marseille, the most Arab city in France. At first I thought the movie was too self-consciously poetic, too faux-innocent. In the opening first scene, Lila approaches Chimo, surrounded by a sunburst or nimbus, and tells him unashamedly that she's beautiful -- she has the face of an angel, she's a Ferrari in a junkyard. Then, with total nonchalance, she asks him, "T'as pas envie de voir ma chatte?"
Doueiri says he had more than 500 French actresses read that scene, and none of them found the tone he was looking for. "I was starting to panic," he says. "Fuck, maybe it doesn't work. Maybe this idea of oral sexuality doesn't work at all. I was just desperately hoping somebody was going to come along and get it right. Then Vahina came in and read the line, and when she says, 'Do you want to see my pussy?' it's like she's saying, 'Do you want to have a cup of coffee?' That was exactly what I was looking for."
If "Lila Says" starts out as a kind of male-fantasy picture, it gradually transforms itself (beginning, perhaps, with that early question) into something else. Lila's pornographic narratives hang over the not-quite lovers like a languorous, unfulfilled promise, and the dreamy, passive Chimo becomes almost as much an erotic presence as she does. Both of these kids need to get out of the dirty-laundry streets of Marseille and escape from Chimo's increasingly threatening deadbeat friends. Their mostly imaginary -- and, in fact, almost completely innocent -- sex life is the only refuge they have.
Doueiri started out, he admits, with a simple question: "I wanted the audience to constantly wonder, 'Is he going to fuck her?'" He wound up with a set of questions about Lila and Chimo that were more complicated and delicate. "The female perspective took over the film," he says with a sigh. "Believe me, that was not my intention, but this developed organically during the shooting. Maybe this makes me a 'women's director.' I think I do have a macho side -- I'll just have to express it in another film."
Unsurprisingly, the camerawork in "Lila Says" is spectacular. Its showpiece is a fantastically fluid series of shots capturing a moped ride Chimo and Lila take along the Marseille docks. (Lila's hand is down Chimo's pants, actually, but we don't see any of that.) "Vahina really craves the screen," Doueiri explains. "I brought the camera right up close to her, using extreme wide-angle lenses, and she looked almost three-dimensional, as though you could reach out and touch her. To me, this scene defined the atmosphere of the film, and I wanted to keep the camera moving with them as they were riding."
It took five days, Doueiri says, to shoot what ends up as three minutes of unforgettable screen time, set to a hauntingly sexy song by Vanessa Daou. "I really wanted to shoot in a postindustrial zone like the docks," he adds. "I didn't want a scene in nature with birds and butterflies. It makes the whole thing trashier, edgier. This is what Lila does -- she creates a sensual aura in the wrong place."
"Lila Says" opens June 24 in New York, July 1 in Los Angeles, July 15 in Boston, July 22 in Chicago and San Francisco, July 29 in Atlanta and Seattle, and Aug. 5 in Minneapolis, St. Louis, San Diego and Washington.
