Hellen
I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
BootDigest
Such a frustrating disappointment
Marketic
It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.
adonis98-743-186503
Two inner-city teenagers engage in an obsessive, innocent flirtation fueled by Lila's sexually explicit overtures. Lila Says is neither entertaining or romantic enough for anyone to actually care plus none of the actors were good or memorable to begin with. If you like this kind of films with sexual stuff in them this one will disappoint you since nothing actually happens but also the storyline is kind of a mess and pretty much misleading as well so i wouldn't expect anything from this flick to be honest with you cause it's really poorly done. (0/10)
mario_c
"Lila dit ça" is a contemporary story about two teenagers, Chimo and Lila, which have a hidden attraction for each other in spite of not knowing each other very well… Chimo (Mohammed Khouas) is a young Muslim guy which lives with his mother and has a group of friends also Arab. He's quieter than the others, he's calm, peaceful and has a great dream: to become a writer… but he thinks he'll never get it… Lila (Vahina Giocante) is a mysterious young girl who arrives in the neighborhood. From the very first moment Chimo is in love with her. At the beginning he didn't notice, he thinks it's just an attraction, but then he'll understand he is… Lila is mysterious, acts strangely, but she's beautiful. She has the face of an angel (as is said by herself in the movie!) but the mind of a devil… She's provocative, insinuating, and she's always speaking about sex, and about her sex… She's a real devil with an angel face! But is she in love with Chimo (as he's for her), or is it just a game to her? By the end the viewer will find out!It's a story about passion (teenage passion), self-discovery, teenage relationships, but it also portrays a reality of mixed cultures. It describes very well the shock between different cultures which stand side-by-side in the French suburbs nowadays… It's just the plot's background but it ends being a good social portrait of these different cultures.All in all it's a good movie which deserves a 7/10 score!
Brandt Sponseller
I'm not exactly the target audience for realist dramas or romance films. My tastes lean heavily towards fantasy, especially horror, the darker side of that broad genre. I tend to prefer stereotypical "guy" and adolescent films. But Lila Says is a beautiful, extremely well made film in many ways. I only subtracted one point because it is just a tad slow in a few sections; however, I can easily see revising my score to a 10 on subsequent viewings.The story is set in an Arab ghetto outside of Paris. Chimo (Mohammed Khouas) has a talent for writing, but because it's not exactly what anyone expects of him, and seriously pursuing it would involve removing himself from the only world that he knows, he sweeps it under a rug more or less and spends most of his time with three somewhat brash friends. Suddenly, a beautiful French girl, Lila (Vahina Giocante), moves into the neighborhood with her foster mom. Chimo and his friends are all understandably taken with her, but she only pays attention to Chimo, in secret. Lila Says is the story of their growing but odd relationship, which despite Lila's increasingly outrageous stories and sexual comments and behavior, remains mostly platonic.I've already mentioned that Giocante is beautiful, as is Khouas, as far as I can judge, but so is the setting and the cinematography. Lila says would be worth a watch for the latter alone. Chimo may live in a ghetto, but director of photography John Daly sure knows how to make gorgeous and attractive. Likewise, the songs and the score in the film are beautiful.But most importantly, the story is very engaging. Director Ziad Doueiri is able to turn a film that is really mostly talking in a limited number of settings into something often as gripping as an adventure/thriller, with hints of both of those genres. Lila's behavior and stories are often surprising, and her relationship with Chimo is complex and realistic. The ending has something of a twist (two, actually) that makes the film more tragic, but at the same time, Lila is a catalyst that brings full realization to "true selves", whether that ends up being a triumph, as in the case of Chimo and his mother, or a disaster, as in the case of another character.
Chris Knipp
"Lila dit ça" is the filming by Lebanese director Doueiri of a somewhat sensational popular French novel set in Marseille. The anonymous author, Chimo, is the main character. An Arab youth with writing talent, he keeps a journal of his encounters with a young blonde provocatrice newly arrived in the neighborhood. He submits the journal for a writing scholarship and it gets him out of the ghetto. The movie shows us what the journal describes: his teasing, frustrating relationship with the blonde cutie.The idea makes sense, but the execution goes wrong. Doueiri's first film, "West Beirut," which showed the youths of that war- torn, partitioned town struggling to grow up like kids anywhere else, was full of humor and charm. But Doueiri falters in this more structured adaptation set in France. From the first moments in "Lila Says" where the young Lolita teases nineteen-year-old Chimo by talking dirty, the scenes between the two principals are embarrassing and awkwardly paced. The photography is crude and poorly lit. Chimo's little gang of pals have zero appeal and are quite unworthy of both Chimo, who's as pretty as the girl and has far more class, or the director, whose Beirut characters seemed to have real backstories and depth. Vahine Giocante, who plays Lila, had a haunting debut as the fugitive girlfriend in Manuel Pradal's 1997 "Marie Baie des Anges." The trouble is this time she can't just rely on her Lolita body and ballet training to move around provocatively; she has dialogue. But is it her delivery, or the crude dirty talk itself that doesn't work? In either case, although it may have succeeded on the page, it seems leaden on the screen.While the sensitive-looking Chimo (Mohammed Khouas) restrains himself, his pals don't, and it all ends badly and foster child Lila is taken away by her off-color female caretaker. Too late it dawns on Chimo that he could have saved the situation if he'd simply declared his love -- and perceived that Lila's four-letter words and porno stories came out of naïve fantasy. He's failed her and betrayed their fledgling love affair, but he's got his ticket out of the Arab quarter and the bus takes him away.The scenes are rickety. It's a shame because the two principals are nice to look at and some of the sets are colorful. But the shock value of a very pretty young blonde who's opener is "Do you want to see my pussy?" has attracted more attention than this effort deserves.As is mentioned in one scene, Arabs are all the rage now in France, in movies anyway, witness Benoît Jacquot's stylish recent love-on-the run noir tale, "À tout de suite." Doueiri ought to have been capable of much more than this stereotypical encounter. The worst part is that it's not even a turn-on.
