Arnaud Desplechin: Kings and Queen (2004)
This is a re-issue. Posted earlier here http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/show...ighlight=SFIFF. Since the film opened in NYC it has done very well critically in the US.
Rois et reine
Review by Chris Knipp
Wildly unedited but consistently engaging
(San Francisco Film Festival showing, March 22, 2005)
23 April 2005
An amazing if somewhat indigestible film, Desplechin's KINGS AND QUEEN (Rois et reine) is a genre-bending family drama that alternates wired comedy with solemn tragedy, in particular nutty violist Ismaël's (Mathieu Amalric's) tax problems and sudden third-party commitment to a mental hospital and ex-girlfriend Nora's (Emmanuelle Devos') discovery that her writer father is dying of advanced stomach cancer. Meanwhile Nora is haunted by memories of the father of her young son Elias (Valentin Lelong), is about to marry a rich "gangster," and other relatives wander in and out of a tumultuous narrative which alternates present tense scenes with flashbacks, dreams and fantasies. Buffoonery and melodrama, which are sometimes hard to separate, turn out to work well together as director Desplechin modestly points out is true of Shakespeare, whose King Lear may have given him the idea for the brutal, vindictive final letter Nora's father, Louis Jenssens (Maurice Garrel) leaves for her. The audience at the SFFF cheered a gratuitous sequence where Ismaël's father Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) singlehandedly subdues three punks trying to rob his convenience store while Ismaël looks on with terror. In the next scene, father and son are lifting weights together at a health club. The plan by Abel, who was himself adopted, to adopt a man who's lived with him and his wife for years, over the protests of his adult children, rhymes palpably with the question of Ismaël's adopting Elias, who doesn't like Nora's new man, Jean-Jacques (Olivier Rabourdin). The long scene where Ismaël explains to Elias why he can't adopt him, while they walk through a museum, is one of a number of tours de force.
Secondary characters in this overwritten but always entertaining drama make themselves hard to forget though buffoonery in the case of the Ismaël's junkie lawyer (Hypolytte Girardot); though their neediness, in the case of Arielle, "la Chinoise" a flirtatious 'princess' at the psych hospital, (Magalie Woch) or Nora's sister down-and-out Chloé, (Nathalie Boutefeu); bitchiness in the case of Ismaë's sister. Ismaël's usual shrink is a huge African grande dame; he gets his entrance exam and his walking papers at the hospital from none other than Catherine Deneuve (whose iciness and soulfulness would be an unforgettable blend even if she were not already one of the world's most beautiful sixty-somethings). The women are goddesses, bitches, or queens. Ismaël says women have no souls; but the story's main men are talented but narcissitic problem children. Elias seems poised to grow up into one of those too. Most of the acting is remarkable, or at the very least arresting. The mercurial Amalric and lovely Devos completely live up to their top billing. Still, even their parts might have done with some trimming back.
The movie comes with allusions to Leda and the Swan, Nietsche, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and a large number of musical references including rap (and a break dancing demo by Ismaël at the mental hospital), Klezmer, Randy Newman and, as a framing device, Moon River. Suspicions that there may be too much going on here are stifled by sheer pleasure in the drama of it all.
Six César nominations in France, where it opened in late 2004.
The title may refer to Shakespeare's plays, or to the way paterfamilias are seen by their children. Kings and Queen is wildly underedited and at 2 ½ hours definitely too long; Desplechin even acknowledged repeatedly that his answers to questions after the SFFF showing were too long too. But his inability to edit his work down may be inseparable from his unique flavor and charm. Desplechin wrote the excellent screenplay for Un monde sans pitié (Love Without Pity, 1989) the story of a fascinating young loser. "Desplechin is a wonder with actresses, at least as long as they're with him: Devos' character is close enough to My Sex Life star and former Desplechin paramour Mariane Denicourt that she responded to the movie with a retaliatory roman à clef," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. A question about this contretemps met with a flurry of interesting doubletalk from the soft-spoken director. 8/10
Posted on Chris Knipp website.
BIGGER than Life and 4 ideas/min.
Kings and Queen, the latest film from co-writer/director Arnaud Desplechin, sprung from the idea of mixing and comparing a melodrama and a "burlesque comedy" whose historically-connected protagonists are quite different in personality.
The melodrama's protagonist is 35 y.o. Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a name borrowed from an Ibsen play but inspired by characters from American "weepies" of the late 40s and 50s and Hitchcock heroines like Marnie and Rebecca. At the age of 25 she experienced the suicide of Pierre, her boyfriend and father of her 10 year old son Elias, for which she blames herself. In the present, she learns her father is on the verge of dying from cancer and she must decide on her own when to terminate treatment because her estranged sister chooses not to get involved. As a matter of fact, Nora's relationships with her son and her father are most intense and enmeshed, even emotionally incestuous. There's a crucial moment in Kings and Queen when Nora comes to this realization. She finds in her dead father's journal a letter addressed to her that expresses a violent love/hate that overwhelms and impedes growth. Nora tears off the pages, burns them in ritualistic fashion, and decides Elias needs a father figure now that his grandad is dead. She decides Ismael fits the bill better than her new husband-to-be.
Ismael is the protagonist of the "burlesque comedy" (as labeled by Desplechin). He was Nora's live-in boyfriend for 7 years and treated Elias as if he was his own son. Ismael is a viola player in a quartet who has been undergoing psychotherapy for 8 years for what appears to be bipolar disorder. When we meet Ismael, he's being hospitalized against his will through a procedure called third-party commitment. We learn that he's being pursued by tax inspectors for failure to pay and that his sister was one of the "third parties" responsible for his hospitalization (a sister that appears more symptomatic than Ismael himself, although the p.o.v. of their scene together is Ismael's and he may be fibbing). Ismael gets his substance-abusing friend and lawyer to help him get discharged but not before befriending a young suicide-prone girl. This is all played for laughs and includes Ismael dancing hip-hop in front of patients and staff, and a slapstick scene in which he and the crazy lawyer raid the pharmacy. There's also a hint (confirmed by Desplechin in an interview with Kent Jones) that the lawyer had sex with the hospital's chief shrink (Catherine Deneuve) in order to expedite Ismael's release.
Scenes from both stories alternate for a while before they begin to merge with increasing frequency. Both stories are told in a free-associational style akin to psychoanalysis, with unexpected flashbacks and fully-visualized dreams. There's a mythic quality to many passages, as Desplechin is not afraid to make the ghost of Pierre appear to Nora or show her father post-mortem reading the tragic letter in what looks like a black-box theatre. The performances are deconstructed by having scenes made up of shots from various takes, sometimes from radically different takes. The script itself is highly intertextual and referential. As a matter of fact, Desplechin states he was inspired by Truffaut directing the scriptwriter of his Wild Child to write one-minute scenes that contain four ideas, and that "realism is just a style like Cubism" so he'd rather be "bigger than life". A film that is both brutally tragic and brutally funny, states the auteur.
It would be quite interesting to analyze the many filmic, literary and mythological references and allusions in Kings and Queen but it would require a lot of time and effort and perhaps a different forum. But a key reference is to Vertigo and its French source novel, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's "D'Entre Les Morts", featured prominently as an intertitle. A reference that also applies to the deaths of Nora's father and Pierre. Nora's journey toward liberating herself from her corresponding guilt about these deaths is the nucleus of Desplechin's rich and generous movie-movie.
