“QUEEN OF PLAY.” | Romance
Not rated (mature audiences). In French with English subtitles. 1 hour, 36 minutes. At the Mayan.
Caroline Bottaro’s charming French film “Queen to Play” is a love story but not the kind we expect: It’s about a woman who falls in love with a game and lets it change her life. The woman is Helène (Sandrine Bonnaire), a chambermaid in a Corsica hotel and a wife in a lackluster marriage, and the game is chess.
Early on, Helène enters a hotel room to clean it and sees on the balcony, through gauze curtains, an exquisite couple playing a languid game of chess; it looks, compared with Helène’s dreary life, like a portrait of paradise.
She becomes quietly obsessed with the game — practicing chess moves with crumbs on the table in a restaurant, or sliding her toiletries around on the bathroom counter — and with the quiet doctor (Kevin Kline) whose house she cleans, who becomes her chess tutor.
Chess is here both metaphor — a symbol of the life Helène dreams of, in which any move is possible — and a means to an end, as she realizes her own worth and her ability to change her future.
As she learns more about chess, she becomes more confident; even to the point of sexily flirting with the doctor simply by reciting chess moves, which never before sounded so hot. (In a more conventional movie, Helène might have had an affair with the doctor; what happens here is less obvious and more interesting.)
Bonnaire beautifully captures her character’s simmering intelligence and vague discontent. Meanwhile, Kline, performing his entire role in French for the first time, again proves himself a master of the raised eyebrow.
Shot in sunny Corsica, whose beauty gives the film an added dimension of pleasure, “Queen to Play” shows us a world opening up, with a game as its gateway.
