Joueuse (2009) - film review

In a small Corsican village, Hélène leads an uneventful but contented life.  In her early forties, she is happily married, has a teenage daughter and works as a chambermaid in a hotel.  One day, she sees a couple playing chess in a hotel room and becomes fascinated by the game.  With the help of Monsieur Kröger, a strange old man, Hélène not only learns the rules of the game but soon becomes a talented player.  But whilst this intellectual awakening gives Hélène a new lease of life, it is not without its consequences, for her relationship with her family and friends...

"Quand on prend des risques, on peut perdre.  Quand on n'en prend pas, on perd toujours."   So says the heroine of Joueuse when asked why chess means so much to her, and the epigram might well apply to the film itself.  Risk is certainly the mot juste when it comes to making a film which revolves around the game of chess.  Some notable films of this genre spring to mind - Richard Dembo’s La Diagonale du fou (1984) and Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players (1977) - but these are rarities, and for a good reason.  What right-minded producer would choose to throw away his grandchildren’s hard-earned inheritance on a film centred on a game that is considered the sole reserve of boy scouts, highbrow intellectuals and Carol Vorderman?   

Writer-director Caroline Bottaro evidently was not daunted by the prospect of trying to sell a chess-based drama to a cinema-going public whose acquaintance with chess was pretty well limited to the Tim Rice musical.  Having scripted several films for director Jean-Pierre Améris - including the bittersweet romantic drama C'est la vie (2001) - Bottaro bravely chose to make her directing debut by adapting Bertina Heinrichs’ novel La Joueuse d'Echecs.  Although, predictably, Bottaro had some difficulty finding a producer, she won through in the end (thanks to the support of her long-term agent Dominique Besnehard) and delivers a distinctive but compelling drama in which chess is both an explicit plot driver and a metaphor for the romantic drama that ensues.  The story is a simple one, showing how a passion can transform a life, for better or for worse, but is handled so delicately and with such understanding of the subtleties of human psychology that it can hardly fail to move an audience.  

Just as the queen is the most powerful piece on the board, so Sandrine Bonnaire is the most powerful element of this film, perfectly cast as the ordinary middleaged hotel cleaner who discovers a new lease of life through the game of chess.  Bonnaire has a particular talent for playing complex characters as ordinary down-to-Earth women, most notably in her portrayal of Joan of Arc in Jacques Rivette’s celebrated Jeanne d’Arc diptych.   Here she gives an exceptional performance, skilfully portraying someone who experiences a profound spiritual renewal through her love of chess and a concurrent liaison with a reclusive older man, played just as sensitively by the well-known American actor Kevin Kline.   Joueuse is an intensely moving, imaginatively crafted piece of cinema which uses the chess motif intelligently and unpretentiously as a potent allegory for life.  Beautifully shot on the island of Corsica, this is an authentic, life-affirming film that will doubtless encourage couples to dig out their chess sets and rediscover the joys of the Sicilian Defence.

© James Travers 2010

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