European Films

"Family can be whatever you want it to be" was the tag-line of the recent US release A Home at the End of the World. In Rois et reine (Kings and Queen), the new film of French director Arnaud Desplechin, family means getting into a whole lot of trouble, pain and strife. I doubt that is what the characters really wanted, but it is what they will get. Much like real life, one could say, perhaps a bit worse, depending on your family.

 

Nora (the prolific Emmanuelle Devos from La femme de Gilles/Gilles' Wife and Bienvenue en Suisse/Welcome to Switzerland) tries to juggle all the men in her life: a child from an earlier marriage called Elias (Valentin Lelong), her second husband who seems mostly invisible and a novelist father (Maurice Garrell) who might as easily love as loathe her. Her father has been hospitalised and his health is quickly deteriorating. Nora, in great distress, is visited by ghosts from her past, notably her first husband (Joachim Salinger), who died even before Elias was born. She feels the need to secure a safe haven for her son, because where will he go in case she passes away suddenly? Elias needs an adoptive father.

 

Nora thinks there is one candidate who could possibly fit the bill: her ex-boyfriend Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric) who lived with her after her first husband’s death and helped her raise Elias for several years. She needs to find Ismaël again, but that is easier said than done. What Nora does not know is that Ismaël now spends his time in a mental hospital, something perhaps not altogether surprising for a man who has evaded tax paying for years (and warns on his answering machine that the tax collectors should not leave him messages), has a noose with a chair under it in his living room ("just in case") and has a hard time taking his job as a concert violinist seriously. He is being treated by the psychologist Vasset (Catherine Deneuve) but they do not get anywhere; he explains to her that women have no soul and thus it is useless for him to be treated by her. At least there are not taxes to pay while he is not working.

 

Rois et reine follows the stories of Nora and Ismaël as they try to navigate the problems of family, parenthood, love and life. They never meet in the film until the epilogue after a long two hours and twenty minutes, though it is clear that they must have seen or spoken with each other off screen before that as Ismaël has the papers for an adoption at his disposal halfway through the film. The script, written by the director together with Roger Bohbot gives us two mightily fascinating characters (incarnated by two actors at the top of their game) but the film has too loose a structure to keep the audience interested for all -- or even most -- of its running time.

 

There are numerous sub-plots that vaguely connect with the story’s ideas about parenthood, responsibility and trying to love and be loved, but most of them seem to orbit too far from the main themes to make for a compact and coherent whole. A scene involving Nora's sister feels as superfluous as the scenes with Ismaël's family. It is not necessary to show the entire family of each character in order to make a film about parenthood; at one point even Ismaël's semi-senile grandmother makes an appearance. Is Desplechin trying to say that every family will eventually disintegrate and be forgotten?

 

The cinematography by Eric Gauthier (Los diarios de motocicleta, Clean) is excellent and rivals the work of the two main protagonists, Devos and Amalric, for luminosity. There are several sequences, however, shot on grainy digital film, that upset the harmony created in the film's look and they feel rather out of place both stylistically as well as content-wise. Desplechin has a similar problem in having created two fascinating characters and an equally fascinating milieu in which they exist, but the characters are not always in sync with the demands of the story, a story that wants less than two hours to be told and a stronger focus on its core themes.

 

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