Critics reviews

France's Arnaud Desplechin has been trying to approximate Shakespeare for the better part of his career, getting closest with the ingeniously eclectic Kings & Queen... Desplechin's sprawling, ambitious movie touches on countless ideas, reference points, and notes of personal tragedy, and yet still somehow manages to be energetic and funny.

That Desplechin descends from the French New Wave directors is evident in his insistence on deconstructing wishful sentimentality, romanticism, and tidiness with cold amusement through subjective eccentrics. In his long, dense, and busy Kings and Queen, he deploys two of France's finest actors—Emanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric—to brilliant effect.

...Kings and Queen (2004) constitutes a more typical Desplechin affair: a two-hour-plus, chaotically populated ensemble effort paced with helter-skelter verve and ricocheting, deliberately and discordantly, between pit-of-despair tragedy and absolute farce.

In [Desplechin's] movies, legend and lore serve as reminders of how timeless our earthly striving is, and how dappled with grandness our lives are. Kings and Queen is the work of a filmmaker of formidable intellectual dexterity. Cerebral though it may be, the film is suffused with enchantment.

Working with the great Eric Gauthier (also the customary cinematographer for Olivier Assayas and Patrice Chereau), Desplechin captures the ever-changing nature of modern life with an ever-moving camera. He also manages to cover more ground than most other contemporary filmmakers, borrowing moods first from one genre and then another, granting each scene its own autonomy as a highly emotional moment.

My Sex Life... operates on a logic of occlusion and expulsion, the frame crowded and held—until the tears and the blood and a shower rain down; Kings and Queen, despite a continued affinity for long lenses and their resultant density, jumps through spaces, cuts frequently, feels more frantic, violent, locomotive. We might say, finally, that Kings and Queen is (like My Sex Life..., I suppose) about what it takes to get mobile in the world—and Desplechin's continued answer may remain magnanimity.

It's easy to forget, in its moments of brisk daffiness, just how radical—in two-movies-in-one form and in content—this movie is; believe it or no, Desplechin can prompt walk-outs that Lars Von Trier could only dream of. That's because, too restless to stay put in the safe confines of the Art ghetto, Desplechin is suggesting the way to a popular cinema of denser, deeper feeling.

[...Desplechin] cuts to an image of the dead man sitting in a nondescript room, reciting the devastating contents of his post-mortem manifesto directly to the camera — to Nora, to us. In that single moment, with its audacious inversion of word and image, Desplechin turns our understanding of the idealized father-daughter relationship inside out... It is gut-wrenchingly intimate and even grotesque, but like all of his intelligent efforts, beautifully cinematic as well.

Costarring two of his favorite actor-creatures, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, as a single mother and her deranged ex-husband, this melodrama follows their narratives separately (she learns her father is dying; he gets committed to a sanitarium) before allowing them to commingle. It adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but you may not realize it for a day or so.

The astonishment doesn't come in the audacity of the combination, or in any sort of Tarantino-esque mix-tape aesthetic-what's truly spectacular about "Kings and Queen" is that the transitions are seamless. Jumping back and forth between the film's two narrative strands, connecting them by character if not so much by basic genre tenets, Desplechin proves to be as skillful at film calisthenics as Altman.

For much of the movie, plot is trumped by texture. Desplechin typically cuts from one chaotic scene to another. Highly original in his flashbacks and dream sequences, he organizes almost free-associational mood shifts and uses music Mark Fiore Corporation for Politicized Broadcasting: Tune In, Turn On, Turn Right ranging from Mancini's "Moon River" (Nora's theme) to mad klezmer tootling—to keep things off balance.

Any idea that Mr. Desplechin has opted for some kind of authorial neutrality, a behind-the-scenes politesse as it were, vanishes when a third character abruptly delivers a late-act speech so steeped in bile it upends everything we think we've understood in this story. This shocking deus ex machina follows a welter of narrative complication and piercing drama shot through with a rich vein of absurdist humor.