Dir: Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2004, 150 mins
Cast: Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve
“I’ve loved four men,” reflects the sunny Nora Coterelle, 35, successful art dealer, loving mother, and three-times wife. “I’ve killed two of them – and that doesn’t mean a thing.” Kings and Queen is, in part, Nora’s confession – not a psychotic guilt-ridden one, but that of a dreamily-contented child. Desplechin’s intimate camera is Nora’s therapist, scrutinizing her make-up, peeling away her neuroses and breaking down her artifice.
Nora’s present happiness is, it emerges, borne of a life of tragedy. We learn in flashback that Nora’s first two marriages were turbulent affairs (literally ‘affairs’ in the sense that neither was officiated) and that her first ‘husband’ died in suspicious circumstances, leaving her pregnant. Our understanding of Nora is constantly being reassessed as her story edges back in time and her sunshine pales into bleaker colours.
No revelation is more brutal than the discovery of a bitterly vitriolic letter written to Nora by her father shortly before his death. How shattering it is to hear a father curse his devoted daughter – her pride, her vanity, her steely reserve and worse. Desplechin has the old man read the letter straight to camera (on grainy home video) as if we ourselves are the intended recipients. These hateful words don’t describe the Nora we know; or maybe they do. Perhaps we have grown fond of a façade.
A character like Nora only exists in terms of what she doesn’t reveal and Emmanuelle Devos’ performance is a masterpiece of subtlety and subtext. Devos is outwardly radiant in this film, but it is a radiance that conceals a fragile muddle of pent-up emotions and haunted memories. There is a visceral current running through Devos’ richly-layered performance which hardly ever manifests itself onscreen; and yet, remarkably, we are always aware of its presence – this gutsy bitterness accruing inside, waiting to explode. Nora’s heart is almost never laid bare; yet its ache is truly palpable.
Desplechin nimbly captures Nora’s pain, fleetingly glimpsed beneath her childish carapace. His camera is clearly in love with Devos and is ultimately forgiving of Nora; still, he is not afraid of gnawing through the surface. In any one scene, he might intimately explore Nora’s face from a dozen angles, all the time nervously jump-cutting a single take into multiple fragments of minutely-shifting perspective. Desplechin is often compared to Woody Allen (and, true, this is a film full of witty, pseudo-intellectual badinage), but Kings and Queen serves to remind that Desplechin’s cinema is also a deftly visual one, full of tiny, almost unnoticeable details.
Nora’s story is told in tandem with that of the eccentric Ismaël, her second ‘husband’, a self-infatuated tax-evading viola player who has been wrongfully locked up in a mental hospital. In contrast to the grim clinical detail of Nora’s half of the film, Ismaël’s story is told in a series of dazzling comic escapades – from his raiding of the hospital pharmacy with his junkie lawyer, to his explosively philosophical assault on Catherine Deneuve’s psychiatrist. Upon his release, Ismaël’s story takes on some bizarre turns and seems to meander beyond the boundaries of the film. (He finds himself, for example, witness to a bodged shoot-out in a provincial épicerie.) But like Nora’s journey, Ismaël’s is also one of self-discovery and includes some similarly shocking revelations, although it is not until the final touching scene with Nora’s son that Ismaël’s finest qualities are revealed.
Mathieu Amalric shines as Ismaël, an inspired comic performance which sends up life’s vicissitudes with great bravura. Far from simply being the light relief, the character of Ismaël is very close to the spirit of the film. Whether parading in a musketeer’s doublet or analyzing Yeats, Ismaël, for much of the time appears to have his head firmly in the clouds. In fact, this is not unlike Nora, who in spite of her cold confrontation with reality, ultimately finds closure only by donning her own protective veneer and by seeking refuge in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. She concludes, like the best fairytales, that “the cycle of woes is now over”. Desplechin seems to be suggesting that there are no happy-ever-after endings in the real world and that it is only in the realm of artifice and fantasy that we can ever attain resolution.
Simon Gray
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