The titles above are movies that I saw recently. The former Lila dit ca (sans accents as said in the title) is French one. I am not sure if it was officially distributed in English speaking countries or will it be soon. There are a couple of points that I found noteworthy in it.

The movie is set in Marseille, the southern sea town in France where Chimo, a struggling Muslim French boy, lives with his mom whose husband has abondoned them for running away with a white French woman. Chimo's life changes when a new girl in town, Lila, a Polish girl, forcefully moves into his otherwise prosaic life and stirs it around by her provocative acts and almost violent flirting.

The funny thing that I found as soon as the movie unfolded was Lila's thick and black eye brows while she proudly and triumpahntly convinced Chimo how people had adored her for her being blonde and blue eyes. To me, this just struck me as a huge joke; this girl might look better in her natural color scheme, supposedly brown hair, so that her obviously latin, probably Italian, facial feature and eye brows fall into place.

Chimo is a typical minority teenage boy in every city in Euro where a ton of immigrants flock together and their second generation come of age; the instructor from school recognizes his talent as a writer and encourages him to go to Paris to attend a creative writing program in University with scholarship. The offer rather confuses him than gets him keep his hope up for future. He finds it easier to drift away in routine life of a series of trifle crimes and trouble with his fellow Muslim local kids. To be short, he is afraid of a change in his life, and tries to talking himself into sinking into the misery of being minority and abondoned than rising above all of them. Still, he starts writing a story that was inspired by Lila at the same time.

The rest of the story is about how she is tantalizing every boy in town by her being 'exotic minority' in the Arabic dominant neighbourhood; she is unusually white, Catholic and seemingly sexually liberated, which translates that she is sexually available and that makes her even more attractive and desireable in their sexually repressed collective psyche. Lila is living with her notorious aunt for fanatic behavior rooted in her Catholic faith and Virgin worship. This seems to involve some sexual abuse for Lila especially because of her fixation on Lila's vagina. This part is unfortunately inadequate in its description. She takes advantage of her being an official guardien of Lila and coerces her to cooperate to gratify her sexual needs, which is justified as religeous one, unless Lila does not mind being sent back to an orphanage. This intimates where Lila's handle of her own sexuality was coming from; she holds onto it as the wild card for her survial. She became&nbs p;immune to be treated as nothing but vagina, a virgin's or a slut's, does not matter, she knew she would be valued just for IT. In the same manner, Lila confuses Chimo by her compulisve lying habit mostly on her imaginary sexual acts committed with other men. 

The trouble occurs due to her showy and extraordinary lie about sex that was Catholic driven. This is enogh to drive her pervert aunt cr azy partly for her jealousy.

Meanwhile, Chimo's buddy, the petty gang leader, who was also after Lila with no luck finds her worth punishing for her not paying any attention back to him.

It is a night in a brothel when he and Chimo finally confronts each other because of the competition over Lila. Chimo refuses to take part in getting a service from a prostitute when everone else was happily taken care of by her. This fuels a little bickering among all. The prostitute suspects Chimo to be homosexual and The Leader gets upsets for Chimo's refual for his hospitality, and he thinks the way Chimo is heppy without getting off might be attributed to his involvement with Lila. He feels that Chimo outsmarted or outsexed him while he is resorting to the commercial sex service. He feels as if he was insulted and he turns it to the prostitute. His verbal abuse, which is mostly focused on racial slur, starts, and ironically that is when what the cast was meant there becomes clear; his slander goes on even when they are back in the car on the way home. He goes on 'that spring role whore etc.' which indicates the prostite's ethnicity that was not obvious in visual infos when the scene offered was Asian;

she was thin and had her hair done in the Princess Lear style in Star Wars. She could pass as white, or something barely white and something else a bit for the rest. It seems that we should naturally assume that she was an Asian hooker, but the way it was coveyed was heavily depended on the public image and cultural vocabulary on Asian women as the group that contributed the influx in the sex industry all over the world rather than represented so only by visual element. In other words, this was only possible when the audience exercises a lot of imagination and his/her streotyped image on Asian women.

The Leader guy feels humiliated that he was content by the prostitute's hand (or her vagina) as opposed to any help from the blond and blue eyes' just as Chimo seems to. This is what the whole bickering was all about.

In a way, the whole movie accentuates how Lila is special and how meaningful it is to be infatuated by her along with the achievement of interracial relationship.

Wait up. There is nothing challenging about minority male's longing for sexual liaison with the majority female given that is the long recognized goal, physically and psycologically, overt or covert, minority's accomplishment, to compensate the undermined mentality caused by colonialism. Therefore, I feel perplexed to see this sort of minority mentality parading and justifying his desire to be unified with a white girl especially for her unexpected innocence and virginity even though it was presented twisted. Isn't is just same as his saying "yeah I just wanted to colonize her back in the manner they did us so that I can write the story backward as in Arabic ?"

There seems to be a novel this movie was based upon. The same title, the author Chimo. You decide how much autobiographical or not as the rule in the publishing industry goes recently. I do not feel like picking this up and bother to read.

Another movie that reminded me of the same theme was Kebab Connection. This is set in Hamberg, Germany. A turkish decsent kung fu film maker wannabe enpregnated his German girl friend. This slapstick with a twist of multiethnic society representati on is basically sustained by the plot of Kung Fu stereotype as if that is at least a free zone of political charge. In other words, I just wonder why people never question Asia as another area people live instead of the area that is the remotest, so they can get away with murder. This movie was about another minority male who wanted to mate with a majority girl at the cost of his prejudice and/or ignorance against Asia. So you watch and decide.

 

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