La Reine blanche (1991) - film review

In 1960, in a coastal town near to Nantes, Jean Ripoche lives with his wife Liliane, their four children and Liliane’s father Lucien.  Jean divides his time between running his plumbing business and making a float for the Nantes carnival.  The Ripoche’s ordered lives are thrown into turmoil when Jean’s former friend, Yvon Legualoudec, returns to the town – with his black wife Annabelle and their three children.  Before he disappeared twenty years ago, without saying a word, Yvon was Jean’s rival for Liliane’s affections.  As bitter memories resurface, the relationship between Jean, Yvon and Liliane become strained.  Yvon suggests that his daughter Mireille should ride on Jean’s float as the Queen of Nantes, just as Liliane did many years ago.  For Jean, this is the final straw...

Despite its impressive star-studded cast, La Reine blanche fails to live up to its expectations and is essentially a rather lacklustre sentimental drama, painfully slow in places.  Richard Bohringer and Bernard Giraudeau put in some spirited, often moving, performances, but the rest of the cast (especially Catherine Deneuve) appear to be bored by the whole thing, and so the film feels at best uneven, at worst woefully stilted.  By failing to show the unpalatable truth about attitudes to black people in the early 1960s, the film appears overly cautious and unconvincing.   In the film’s most dramatic scenes we do, however, get a glimpse of the much better work which this could have been if its director had been prepared to take a few more risks.

© James Travers 2003

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