Jess lanai

My greatest accomplishment is not what I’m very well known for.

My role in ‘Mektoub my love canto due’

Why I consider my role in Abdellatif Kechiches ’Mektoub’ my greatest achievement is a separate matter that I might go into later.

This post is about the Abdellatif Kechiche method of directing and why I appreciate it.

If you don’t know who Abdellatif Kechiche is, which is likely very few people know me through Abdellatif Kechiche, he is a film director.

His most popular film in the U.S. is ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’. But my favorite Abdellatif Kechiche film is the one I was in, ‘Mektoub my love canto due’

Before my own film came into existence my favorite Abdellatif Kechiche film was ‘the Secret of the Grain’

If you look up Abdellatif Kechiche you will see that he is quite a controversial character.

My take on working with Abdellatif Kechiche will also be quite controversial.

If you are reading this I’m going to assume you do not know who Abdellatif Kechiche is. I’m also going to assume you didn’t bother to stop reading this and look him up.

So I will use my own words and my own perspective to explain why Abdellatif is controversial.

My perspective is perhaps a bit flawed.

It could be argued that because I came from a career in pornography that I am ‘desensitized’ or whatever.

But to defend my perspective I’ll also point out that even though I was a pornographic actress what’s more important to realize is that I was also a gigantic bitch.

My bitchiness is very important to take into account. Because as a bitch I am very quick to directly point out anything that pisses me off and have a temper tantrum about it.

How does that defend my perspective? Because it means no one can call me meek or easily taken advantage of or easily influenced.

I do what I want and get in everyone’s face and make them suffer if they try to make me do something I do not want to do.

The male gaze. That’s a phrase a lot of people use these days. And it’s a phrase critics use a lot to describe Abdellatif Kechiche.

It’s one of his biggest criticisms.

In ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ there is a very long lesbian sex scene that’s pretty damn explicit.

In the ‘Mektoub my love canto uno’ there’s a lot of shots of very sexy girl butt and girls in bikinis and also, a pretty epic sex scene.

In the infamous ‘Mektoub intermezzo’ that was only played once at the Cannes film festival and never released to the public, there is a lot more shots of sexy girl butts. A lot of shots of sexy girl butts dancing. And a very long, very explicit and entirely real cunnilingus scene.

Personally, from my own very flawed and desensitized perspective, I saw only very artistic reasons to include all that sexiness in the films.

The cunnilingus scene was so full of anger and frustration. I did not find it sexy. It showed more the violent desperation of how a girl was trying to break free of her feelings.

The many shots of butts showed that the main character Amin was constantly looking at butts. That he was not as innocent as he tried to imply.

But forget all that. Forget my artistic nonsense arguments for why lots of butts and sex weren’t male gaze.

Let’s say it was all totally just male gaze.

What is the real and actual problem with the male gaze in general?

As a former porn star I am very qualified to answer this question.

People like to get out raged about things and just repeat phrases like ‘male gaze’ but that doesn’t mean they aren’t actually outraged and they don’t have a real reason to be outraged.

They just don’t know how to put their outrage into the right words nor where exactly their outrage is coming from.

As a former porn star my entire purpose within my career was for the male gaze. To cater to it.

I’m very uniquely qualified to talk about the ‘male gaze‘ because I’ve seen both sides of it.

I’ve been the side of it.

What is it like to be the thing and the object of the male gaze? To actively cater to it blatantly?

Well there are two ways in which you can cater to the male gaze.

The first way is the way I played it. And it’s the way all porn people and all sex workers play it.

We play to it like it’s a joke.

It becomes something playful to be mocked and not taken too seriously because the acknowledgement of it creates a layer of protection from it.

What people are afraid of when they say things like ‘male gaze’ is the other kind of male gaze. The one that’s more sinister and tries to fly under the radar.

Authentic, equal exchange, genuine effort towards a greater cause is what most human beings want.

Like. Example.

If I meet a man that I really genuinely like, I want him to genuinely like me. I don’t want him to pretend he likes me more than he does to get sex out of me.

I want him to want to build something with me. I don’t want him to cater to me. I don’t want to cater to him. I want an equal exchange.

A very similar thing happens when we watch something like independent film. We want authenticity. We want equal exchange and genuine effort towards a greater cause.

We don’t want someone coming in and trying to appeal to shallow emotions just to get ahead.

So being critical of film, art, books or whatever it is, is a very natural defense mechanism against the people that might try to cheat.

Being outraged by the male gaze can be an effect of this defense mechanism.

Because men can very easily have their judgements clouded by sex appeal. It can skew their vision so that they don’t notice the important things and instead get lost in feeding a faulty ego.

So I understand the criticism of the male gaze.

However.

Lots of women assume that the male gaze is purely on looks. They have terrible attitude on men and do not realize that looks are not the only thing that appeal to men.

That men actually can have very incredible insight into all the qualities that make a woman appealing sexually. That they are often very good qualities and there’s not always something so wrong with the male gaze.

Back to the subject matter of this post.

Abdellatif Kechiche.

I’m going to say the real truth about him.

About his methods.

Here I can say I might actually be a flawed perspective because I am not an actor. Abdellatif Kechiche was my first and only experience being directed in a movie.

So what the hell do I know?

My perspective might also be very offensive to a lot of people. Because my insight from doing this one film was that actors are very greedy.

And honestly pretty lazy and dramatic.

From my perspective they wanted so much for so little.

Because another criticism on Abdellatif Kechiche is his harsh and hostile work environment.

To me doing a film like Mektoub was a project.

It was a training camp.

It was like going on a spiritual journey. I felt I was there to exercise myself and my capabilities and contribute an aspect to a whole.

I was a part in a film. I liked the film I was in. I wanted to contribute to it in whatever way I could, even if that meant not being in it.

That’s why making films or doing theater can be so fun. Because of the team work and the higher purpose of the film as a whole.

I expected doing that film to be very, very hard. Not hard in a way where someone is mistreating me or I’m upset in any way.

But hard in the way where it’s very challenging because I’m trying to improve something.

I didn’t find Abdellatif to be any different than any sports coach I’ve ever had. Sometimes he pushed me. Sometimes he encouraged me. He adjusted his methods to best suit me. He communicated with me. He gave me everything he had so that I could do the best I could possibly do.

He did that for every actor. I think that’s highly admirable and worthy of a lot of respect. The attention and dedicated he gives his actors shows in his films and his methods are not meant to be easy. They are meant to be of genuine help to improvement.

They are meant to improve you and get the very best you are capable of doing. Which is fun to experience. Hard yes. But also fun. So I very much enjoyed Abdellatif’s methods.

What I did not enjoy about Abdellatif Kechiche was his constant scheduling mishaps and constant fighting with producers that constantly changed plans and made everything more complicated than it needed to be.

All that was very annoying.

But it was still worth the fun I got to have.