Rois et reine (2004) - film review

Nora, the manager of a Parisian art gallery, is about to marry for a third time.  Her first husband, Pierre, is dead, her second, Ismaël, has recently been committed, against his will, to a psychiatric establishment.  When she learns that her father is dying from cancer, Nora asks Ismaël if he will adopt her infant son.  Ismaël, a musician burdened by tax claims, has problems of his own...

If there is a French film that has caused more purple prose to be splattered across film review pages than any other in recent years it is Arnaud Desplechin’s latest flamboyant spectacle of self-indulgence and unfettered artistic bulimia.   When it is so generously compared with the works of such masters as Bergman, Godard, Hitchcock and Truffaut, you would think that Rois et reine is the best thing to come out of French cinema since Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis.  Would that it were...

Let there be no mistake, Arnaud Desplechin is assuredly one of the most inspired, creative and original film directors working in France today.  His films are personal, introspective dramas that pack a powerful punch and make truthful statements about human relationships and the world we now live in.  But they are not easy to watch.  Desplechin is one of those art house directors who cherishes style way above characterisation and narrative content and so, whilst his films are often striking in their approach, they can also feel lacking in substance and more than a little tedious.

Rois et reine is a case in point.  Here is a film that has some moments of absolute genius that will send any self-respecting film critic into a supreme state of naval contemplating nirvana from which he or she will emerge in a frenzy of keyboard tapping adulation.  The film’s fragmented style and patchwork narrative construction perfectly captures the fractured, emotionally turbulent world of its two main characters – played superbly by Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric.  You could go on forever praising individual parts of the film, picking out bits here and there which demonstrate Arnaud’s skill as a director.

The problem is that, taken as a whole, the film is somewhat less impressive than its individual parts.  It’s an overblown, overlong, cinematic potpourri that feels too self-conscious, too artificial to have the deep emotional impact that it deserves to have.   Watching this film is a bit like subjecting yourself to a few dozen fairground rides whilst filling your face with ice cream.  Each ride gives you a tremendous thrill, so much so that you have to try another and another, and each time a sense of wild exhilaration hits you.  But at the end of it you have a slight nausea and a feeling that you have wasted an evening in shallow pleasure-seeking pursuits, if you are lucky.  In the worst case, you fall onto your face and vomit up your intestines, whilst vowing never to repeat the same experience.  I fear that a lot of people who went to see this film having read the wildly over-the-top reviews may think twice before they watch another French film...

© James Travers 2008

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