Film

Kings & Queen (2004)

Director: Arnaud Desplechin

Movie review

From Time Out London

Resembling, at least on first glance, the skittish outpourings of a crackpot fabulist, Arnaud Despleschin’s tumultuous return to the form of ‘Ma Vie Sexuelle’ teems with life, art, myth and madness; it’s a careening modern relationships melodrama that undercuts the usual routines of French chamber cinema with left turns into ghost story, bedlam burlesque, cornershop shootout and even a madcap rap moonwalk. The film knocks between two ex-lovers, Nora and Ismael (Despleschin regulars Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric), whose lives have taken paths nearly as divergent as their outlooks on them. Nora thinks that her story is the stuff of romantic literature, and frames it with self-authorial and self-authorising commentary (‘I’ve loved four men in my life; I’ve killed two of them,’ she ’fesses at one point). Persons unknown think Ismael’s recent turns are stuff for the psychiatric ward, and we first meet him failing to fend off two white-coated callers by dropping references to Apollinaire (they’re more interested in the noose hanging in his living-room). Before his drug-popping, live-wire lawyer (Hippolyte Girardot) prises him free, Ismael has a doozy of a scene where he explains to his doctor (Catherine Deneuve, no less) his theory that women have no souls: they live in bubbles, aimlessly, whereas men ‘live to die’. But here he’s the freewheeling radical, whereas Nora seems more the methodical freeloader. Prospecting a third husband, she discovers that her father is full of cancer and bile, which leads her back to Ismael as a caretaker for her son Elias. A jitterbug web of subtly rhyming recriminations, wrong-footing revelations and the odd reconciliation, the film is enrapturing to watch, full of appositely grandstanding performances and tumbling improvisatory technique. It insists that life is large and absurd, that we are gods and monsters, and that we stymie ourselves in our masks and guises; it’s majestic movie-making.

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