rench director Arnaud Desplechin likes to think big. Best known for his three-hour treatment of twentysomething angst and confusion, My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument, Desplechin’s newest film, Kings and Queen is a dizzying mess of styles, themes, literary, and cinematic allusions, plot twists, and emotions that heightens real life into the realm of melodrama and myth. With a restless energy and go-for-broke style, Desplechin keeps his film briskly paced and unpredictable, despite its excessive two-and-a-half-hour length. Not everything works, and the film loses focus at times, with too many loose ends and underdeveloped ideas. But as a director who works in large strokes, Desplechin seems more interested in the overall emotional experience of a film, rather than the cohesiveness of its narrative. In trying to reveal the madness of everyday life, he has made an equally mad, reckless film, which veers moment-to-moment from broadly comic to deeply tragic.

The film begins with Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a successful thirty-ish art gallery director, describing her life to an off-camera interviewer (in a style admittedly cribbed from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives). She is a widowed single mother, with a young son and a new wealthy husband, whom she admits she married partly for money. On a trip to visit her father, a respected writer, she finds him terminally ill, with only weeks to live. Devos radiates a graceful composure as Nora, but even in these early scenes, her nervous eye-blinks and twitches reveal troubles beneath the surface.

As Nora’s life begins to spin out of control, we meet Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), a neurotic, highly animated violist, whose recent erratic behavior has led him to be mistakenly committed to a mental ward. Ismael makes the most of his time there, entertaining the other inmates, drinking, having sex, doing battle with a psychiatrist (Catherine Deneuve in a self-referential cameo), and seeking help from his drug-bingeing lawyer.


As their two stories progress, Ismael’s comic desperation juxtaposing Nora’s quiet suffering, we discover that they are ex-lovers, and that he helped raise her son. In the film’s second half, entitled “Cruel Releases,” memories begin mingling with the present, and some shocking revelations are made which reverse our assumptions about each character and paint Nora as a rather tragic heroine.

The script, co-written by Desplechin with Roger Bohbot, most resembles one of Woody Allen’s family portraits of love and neuroses. Yet in his love of actors, and cinema-verite jump-cuts, Desplechin is more akin to Cassevettes. He trusts his actors immensely, and gives them meaty parts that run the gamut of experience and emotions. This trust pays off throughout the film, especially in the case of Devos, who gives Nora a depth that makes her transformation, as truths are revealed, utterly believable. Desplechin wants us to love his characters, and his compassion shows through in the warts-and-all portrayals.

As mentioned, Desplechin succeeds in pulling the rug out from under the audience at every turn, and does so with visual panache. One of the most crucial and surprising flashback scenes, between Nora and the father of her child, was shot twice, once in a real apartment and once on a black-box stage, with the footage spliced together to provoke unsettling doubt about both the tricks of memory and Nora’s reliability as a narrator.

Narrative is a tricky thing in this film, and Desplechin packs in the literary and mythological allusions as a way of showing the many ways in which people try to create order and meaning to life through art. In fact, nearly every character in the film seeks refuge in art as a coping mechanism, especially Nora’s father, who can only communicate honestly to her through his final book. Conversely, Desplechin seems to find comfort in life’s disorder. Only by acknowledging the things that are out of their control can his characters begin to live honestly with themselves and others.