Kings and Queen (2004)

Well Deserved Praise

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

In Paris, the thirty-five year old Nora Cotterelle (Emmanuelle Devos) has been the director of a famous art gallery for six months and will marry the wealthy owner Jean-Jacques (Olivier Rabourdin) within the next weeks. When she travels to Grenoble to meet her beloved son Elias (Valentin Lelong) that is spending vacation with her father, the professor and writer Louis Jenssens (Maurice Garrel), she discovers that Louis has a terminal cancer, and she decides to stay in Grenoble nursing her father. Nora recalls her relationship with Elias' father Pierre (Joachim Salinger) and with her viola player lover Ismaël Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), who raised Elias for seven years and for whom her son has a great affection. Meanwhile, Ismaël is interned in a psychiatric hospital against his will. Along the days, Nora and Ismaël discover cruel secrets about their families' relationships.I bought this DVD with great expectations since I like French movies and the remarks in the cover of the Brazilian DVD, highlighting the awesome performance of Catherine Deneuve. I found a reasonable but pointless and messy story of a selfish woman (the queen) and her four men (the kings) that oscillates between the drama and comedy genres with an uneven result; too long, boring in some moments and with unnecessary scenes like, for example, the despicable declaration of hate of Louis to Nora in the draft of his last book, or the useless speech of Ismaël to Elias in the end. Last but not the least, the cameo of Catherine Deneuve has nothing special to deserve a reference on the cover of the DVD but deceiving her fans. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Reis & Rainha" ("Kings & Queens")

"Rois et reine" aka "Kings and Queen" (2004) directed by Arnaud Desplechin is a most unusual film that mixes expertly comical and tragic, unbearable and optimistic, life and death that are intertwined in the story of two former lovers whose lives have crossed once more when they least expected. Nora (Devos) has to take care of her dying father. Ismael (Almaric), a talented but neurotic musician (Roman Polansky + Woody Allen) is mistakenly committed to a mental hospital under the care of a clinical psychiatrist, forever young and still the most beautiful woman in the world, Catherine Denueve. ("Do you know that you are very beautiful"? - asked Ismael. "I've been told", smiles she). I still think about the movie - the complicated relationships between one woman and several men in her life - how much she affected them, sometimes, with tragic consequences. This is also the movie about perception - how big is the difference between the way we see ourselves and the others see us and what they think of us in reality. It is a movie about love - is it always blind? Is it possible to love deeply and see with the clear eyes? I was totally engrossed and heartbroken by some scenes involving Devos's caring for her dying father, by the flashbacks that tell about her relationship with the father of her son, and next minute I was laughing out loud following the Almaric's ordeal in a mental hospital and his attempts to escape. The movie could've been a gem but it is too long, has too many characters that were perhaps very interesting but I never knew what happened to them and it could be confusing due to its broken narrative which was OK by me but the final result even compelling and memorable was not completely satisfying. Both Mathieu Almaric and Manu Devos are marvelously talented actors and they were the main reason that overlong and confusing movie worked. I hope to see both Almaric and Devos in many more movies. I remember Devos since the first movie I saw her in - "Sur Mes Levres" and I knew then that she had all potentials to become a great actress. Her acting in "Rois et reine" confirmed my first impression.

"Kings and Queen (Rois et reine)" is a deceptively beautiful looking exploration of the differences between appearances and substance.Our first impressions of each parallel character who seems to have no relation with any other character undergo a complete turn-around by the time we have finished circling around them in time and space at the end of the film, especially as we begin to realize they are unreliable, self-serving narrators of their own experiences.Each person is part of a very modern blended family, both by genetics and selection, and faces the most quotidian of life cycle decisions -- life, birth, marriage, paying bills, parent/child responsibilities, Laingian sanity and particularly death -- and makes a different choice how to handle them, whether active or passive, peremptorily or as fate.But each choice leads them to the next unexpected plateau of choices with guilt hanging on each move. For each, doing the right thing means something completely different as each responds differently to an emotional and physical crisis.Though psychoanalysis is drolly mocked as just another philosophy, each character may be eccentric or seriously crazy and undergoes Freudian traumatizations by family in casually cruel ways that alternate between funny and shocking (and sometimes absurd).Director/co-writer Arnaud Desplechin revels in the diversity of his characters, so that as their orbits collide they can hardly communicate because their frames of reference are so different.The acting brilliantly matches the unexpected revelations that flash back to let us know how each character got to be this person and the transformations to where they are going. Emmanuelle Devos as "Nora" lusciously fills the screen even as we find that her nonchalant beauty masks the devastation she leaves in her wake as it helps her use others for her selfish needs.Desplechin has frequently cited Woody Allen as an influence (and "Seinfeld"), and Mathieu Amalric's Ismaël is a tribute to that talkative, intellectual Jewish persona and Philip Roth is mentioned as well, though this character is much more up on hip pop music and surprisingly matures as he gains far more humanity than his New York inspirations.The film is long and slow, but curiosity about how each character got to where the film started is involving.It's impossible to keep up with all the erudite references to poetry (Desplechin says the title comes from a chess metaphor in a French poem: "King without kingdom/ Queen without a scene/ Castle broken/ Bishop betrayed/ Fool as a brave man"), literature, mythology, art, music and film ("Moon River" seems to be used frequently these days).Eric Gautier's cinematography is sensual and is particularly dreamy when an awful event occurs.The production design creates illustrative environments for each person and family, as every object around each character has ironic counterpoint to the dialog.The soundtrack eclectically extends from electronica to klezmer to hip hop to singer/songwriters Paul Weller and Randy Newman to classical and more that reflect the characters' psychological mise en scenes.

Armand Deplechin's "Rois et Reine" offers a lot of different ideas, plots and subplots. Unfortunately, most of them aren't as fully realized as in his other, better made films. Then, the copy that is showing at New York's Lincoln Plaza complex, has a washed out look to it, and the subtitles aren't visible at times. The viewer has to strain the eyes in order to get all what's going on in this complex tale. This is a big problem for foreign films with subtitles that seem to fade in the picture itself. Also, at the session we went there was an annoying group of ladies who, evidently, must have been watching another film, as they kept laughing at times when they should have remained silent.At any rate, this is a complex film that seems to have a lot of influences, mainly mythological and even it has shades of Shakespeare's King Lear. At two hours and forty minutes in length, the film could have used some badly needed trimming. It appears M. Desplechin don't know when to cut some of the things one sees in different sequences that could have been helped with the principle that "less is more".One thing the director can't be blamed for is the wonderful performances he gets from all his actors, especially, the luminous Emmanuelle Devos, who does an amazing work portraying Nora, the woman at the center of the story. Also good, Mathieu Amalric, who is Ismael, the man that connects a lot of different points to the story. Maurice Garrel, as Nora's dying father is compelling. Valentin Legong as little Elias is also a great asset.Let's hope M. Desplechin new venture will be a bit tighter in his future work.