Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
The most amazing film I've seen in a while -- you must immediately try to find it. Plus: A true tale of bad Hollywood parenting, and an up-close look at kick-ass stuntwomen.
May 12, 2005 | Nobody makes big, sprawling movie melodramas like Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen" anymore, but that's because nobody ever did. It's been a good season for foreign films already, and a busy few weeks for earnest and sometimes adventurous documentaries. But this film blows everything else I've seen lately out of the water. Everything else for weeks, months, maybe years. This is an explosive, funny, tragic, challenging and constantly surprising movie that seems to encompass all genres -- it's got gunfire and lost love and French hip-hop and Anton Webern chamber music and devastating messages from dead people and the most beautiful femme fatale you've ever seen.
European film doesn't have much traction with American viewers right now, and we could bore ourselves stupid trying to figure out the reasons why. But for God's sake, see this one. When I tell you that it's a French movie that's 150 minutes long -- well, let's face it, your heart sinks. But I was so wrapped up in its world of love and betrayal and madness, its story of a pampered belle and a man crumbling into insanity in a trashed apartment and the skein of invisible threads connecting them, that when it ended I didn't want to leave. If I could have convinced the projectionist at the press screening to load up the first reel and start over, I'd have sat through it again.
I've arrived late to the international party of critics and film buffs celebrating Desplechin, but like anybody getting turned on to a new drug by the cooler kids, I want more and more and more. Desplechin is an admirer of both Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock, and that's a good starting point, as well as a delicious one. A lot of filmmakers talk about bridging the gap between high-gloss pop spectacle and independent auteur cinema, but "Kings and Queen" is one of the best, and most alive, attempts to do that in at least a generation. This is a movie you'll carry with you the rest of your life, maybe the way you carry "Fanny and Alexander" or "Vertigo" or "Berlin Alexanderplatz" or "Wings of Desire" or "Chungking Express" or, you know, fill in the blank yourself. It's really that good.
It wouldn't be fair to stack another dramatic film against "Kings and Queen," so Christophe Honoré's erotic excursion "Ma Mère" (starring Isabelle Huppert as the eponymous hot mama), which is well worth considering on its own terms, will have to wait for next time. Documentary fans, however, have several intriguing offerings on the horizon, including two that go behind the scenes in Hollywood (in quite different directions) and one that unravels a long-standing (and pretty darn kinky) literary mystery.
Four kings, one queen and the passions that link two former lovers
From the very beginning, Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), the protagonist of Kings and Queen" -- or one of its two protagonists, anyway -- makes you uncomfortable. That is, OK, she made me uncomfortable, and profoundly so. She's basically just too damn beautiful, and the effect is both distracting and disorienting. It took me a while to figure out that this was deliberate. As I'd later figure out, Devos has starred in most of Desplechin's six movies and serves as something like his muse (they're not lovers or anything, but to French filmgoers they're strongly identified with each other), so whatever strange and almost indescribable quality she's got, he's pretty familiar with it.
Nora tells us about her life in voice-over in the movie's first scene, while an elegant lounge-jazz version of "Moon River" plays on the soundtrack -- and these are the first clues that there are elements of eccentric movieland artifice competing with Desplechin's naturalistic storytelling mode. There she is, drifting through well-lit Parisian rooms in her immaculate skirts and little periwinkle sweaters and self-absorbed Mona Lisa smile, with her impossibly sculpted alabaster face and her cascade of auburn-goes-to-chestnut hair.
She's been married twice, she tells us; one husband died young and she left the second. She has a 10-year-old son, Elias, whom she rarely sees (and who will play an important role later in the film). She has come to think of love as a question of never having to ask for anything, of having one's needs catered to at all times, and now she's marrying Jean-Jacques, a rich businessman whose cascade of trinkets signify a great love. This is maddening (and, as we later figure out, a lot of it isn't quite true). Then you look at her, a Botticelli goddess let loose in the Dior boutique with a platinum card, and wonder whether she might be the most beautiful woman on the face of the planet.
Unlike most of the beautiful women in French movies, Nora/Devos is withheld from us more than she's given to us. (In this sense, she is very much like one of Hitchcock's ice-queen heroines.) We never see her naked, in either a sexual or a casual context; we don't see her even in her underwear or a bathing suit. We do see her, over the course of the film, after childbirth, after the death of her lover (these are flashbacks) and prostrate with tears after learning that someone she loves -- possibly the only person she loves -- is dying rapidly and painfully. She always looks nearly perfect, as if Raphaël were standing outside the frame, brush before canvas, ready to paint her.
