DIRECTOR Arnaud Desplechin says he and Roger Bohbot operated from a single guideline when they were writing Kings and Queen: to be brutal, brutally tragic and brutally comic, adding, "I hope we shake you up a little." They certainly do, and when it's least expected.
Moon River, the dreamy theme from Breakfast at Tiffany's, plays as the film introduces Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a 35-year-old Paris art gallery dealer as beautiful and doe-eyed as Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly. Holly's ambition was to find a rich man to marry, and as Kings and Queen gets underway, Nora is engaged to an older, wealthy man.
Nora is the movie's queen, surrounded by men and rarely seen in scenes with other women. Her first husband died tragically, shortly before the birth of their son, now 10 and spending the summer in Grenoble with Nora's ailing father, a crusty author.
Nora's story is interrupted with the introduction of a parallel narrative concerning her second husband, Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), a manic-depressive musician who plays viola in a string quartet and likes to leave a noose hanging from his ceiling. Confined to a mental institution, he befriends a suicidal Sinology student and tells her he is not mad, but merely a judicial error.
The movie is formed as two chapters with an epilogue. In the first, we learn about Nora and Ismael from their individual points of view. In the second, we see them in a different light, from the perspectives of the people in their lives. This is when Desplechin shakes us - and them - up.
Kings and Queen is Desplechin's fourth full-length feature film, following La Sentinelle, My Sex Life, Or How I Got Into an Argument, and Esther Kahn. It is also his most ambitious, freewheeling and original. His protagonists are voluble and introspective as ever, and his dramatic structure unconventionally shaped, veering off on tangents that appear pointless but are not, and incorporating flashbacks, dream sequences, scenes that echo each other, jump cuts, authentic locations and the odd stylised set.
The movie is suffused with cultural references - to Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Yeats, Hitchcock and even breakdancing - as it reflects on life and death, love and marriage, parenthood and responsibility, parting and forgiveness, private trauma and shock therapy, and the need to be cruel to be honest, if not kind.
The wonderfully subtle Devos and the remarkably expressive Almaric, both Desplechin regulars, are terrific in a fine cast that notably features Maurice Garrel as Nora's austere father, Catherine Deneuve as a candid, chain-smoking psychiatrist, Hippolyte Girardot as a nervy, coke-fuelled lawyer, and Joachim Sagnier, an actor with extraordinary eyes, as Nora's first husband.
