“Kings and Queen,” by Arnaud Desplechin, has everything you could want in a French art movie:
Yet with all that and much more, “K and Q” left me cold. Maybe those tonal swings were a little too bold, or perhaps the characters, for all their flaws and behavioral surprises, just didn’t turn into people whose fates mattered to me.
I’m hedging this opinion because, by any measure of objective criticism, an intelligent story is being told here in a very artful manner. But I think Desplechin failed to invest us in his characters’ lives.
They are eventful lives, though, no question. Sometimes narrator Nora (the terrific Emmanuelle Devos from “Read My Lips”) at first comes off as a likably upfront, if slightly self-satisfied, Parisian gallery owner. But the impending death of her author father, Jennsens (Maurice Garrel), not only throws her comfortable life into a tizzy but also opens the floodgates to shocking flashbacks and ghostly visitations from failed relationships.
Nora grows desperate to get an official father on the books for her loved but neglected 10-year-old son, Elias (Valentin Lelong). Though not the boy’s father, Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), her divorced second husband, was the only lover who ever got along with Elias. Trouble is, the neurotic viola player can’t officially adopt the kid, as he’s being held against his will in the kind of mental-health facility that permits drinking, sex between patients and staff, and raids with your tax lawyer on the hospital pharmacy. Deneuve, who is only in a handful of scenes, seems to be the head psychiatrist.
The best scenes involve the ways Nora and Ismael respond to these betrayals. They are what draw us, if anything, into the intellectual fun house/hothouse that “Kings and Queen” turns out to be.
*** | “Kings and Queen”
NOT RATED but contains scenes of nudity, language and violence|FAMILY DRAMA|2 hours, 30 minutes|Directed by Arnaud Desplechin; written by Roger Bohbot and Desplechin; in French with subtitles; photography by Éric Gautier; starring Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Magali Woch, Maurice Garrel, Catherine Deneuve, Hippolyte Girardot|Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
