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.