Critics reviews

While the signposting and some clunky storytelling, including the literalized knee-injury frame, and a regrettable (but short) sequence in which Tony struggles with her own addiction are hackneyed, My King is a reminder that even stories of the grandest, most exuberant aspects of life sometimes find truth in the smallest of details.

Like actor-turned-director Maïwenn's last film, Polisse (co-written by Bercot), My King is overlong and overheated, suggesting a filmmaker who's better at getting actors to yell at each other than at judging what's essential. But here, there's no professional milieu to explore, no genre mechanic to lend it a whiff of urgency—just another go at the storied cinematic tradition of French people in broken relationships.

The director, Maïwenn (who wrote the screenplay with Étienne Comar), knows how to make dysfunction delicious and self-destruction a blast. Told in flashback, the breathless collision and decade-long duel between Tony, a guarded lawyer, and Georgio (Vincent Cassel, spraying pheromones), an impulsively charismatic restaurateur, is a tango of light and shade.

The tears and recriminations, eruptions and reconciliations hold a begrudging fascination for about an hour; at the very least, My King is mostly free of the egregious tonal shifts in Maïwenn's previous shout-y soaper, Polisse (2011). After that, though, the volume is never turned down and these characters are never less than the most unendurable company.

Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery—of feeling as if you're effacing yourself for someone for a vaguely defined higher cause, enabling abuse to continue into eternity. My King feels as if it comes from a deeply personal place, understanding a love that can be truly described as a drug.

[Maïwenn] often allows scenes to run longer than expected to allow us to hang out with these characters and observe their behavior in detail. But while revelations about the characters—Georgio's alcoholism and infidelity, Tony's own struggles with depression during her pregnancy—may be dropped into a scene, the film too quickly moves onto the next one without their implications given enough room to breathe.

Mon Roi is a sweet-and-sour absolute treat of a film for those of us who conceive of the art as insightful exercise for our empathy muscles, and a pointless navel-gazing affair for the rest. That's not to say Mon Roi is without textbook artistic merits, only that its realism, which involves and soars on a fair amount of adlib, can make some seekers of loftier purposes cringe.

Bercot gives an absurdly overwrought performance as a woman obsessed with a lying, cheating drug addict (Vincent Cassel) in Maïwenn's interminable soap opera Mon Roi.

[Maïwenn is] playing the cards of instinct, and she really believes it, you know? But that doesn't make it good. That makes it sincere. What I like in what she does is the latitude that she gives to the actors. The fact that you really see them understanding that somebody is giving them that, and they're really enjoying it in an almost obscene way.

In certain ways it was quite nuanced and it had some interesting insights about the complexities and difficulties of relationships between men and women in their 40s. All of that embedded in, yeah, a very overacted or semi-histrionic treatment. I didn't think it was a dumb film. I really didn't.

...Mon roi reduced me to tears as well — tears of agony, that is, as I watched yet another unbearably histrionic melodrama a la Maiwenn, the unidentifiable filmmaking object previously responsible for 2011's Cannes competition entry Polisse... I suspected we might be in for something uniquely terrible, but I'll be damned if, over the next two-plus hours, "Mon roi" didn't keep surpassing even my own wildest expectations.

Critics here shrugged mightily over the film, but Maïwenn (director of Polisse, a hit of the 2011 festival) gets at some of the raw sadness of what it means for a woman to be deeply in love with an unstable guy. The movies are full of men who are obsessed with Betty Blue-type nut jobs yet just can't stay away. Maïwenn turns the tables, and even though the film is slightly messy and far too long, she still claws her way to something candid and believable.