Kings And Queen

This is a really charming film featuring our mortal enemies, the French. Emmanuelle Devos plays Nora, a woman preparing for her third marriage while her father dies of cancer. Meanwhile, her ex-husband Ismaël has been locked up in an insane asylum, where he finds free drugs, free love and a dearth of other freedoms. The plot, though, is secondary to the depth of character exposition and the sly filmic technique of director Arnaud Desplechin. Using elements from soap operas, Westerns and Hollywood melodramas, Desplechin makes an interesting pastiche, but one where the characters are never overshadowed by cinematic references. In a movie that features a gunfight, two deaths, one surrealist sequence, a series of sudden orchestral swells and one of the finest performances of the last year (Mathieu Amalric as Ismaël), there’s something for everyone. Well, everyone except Bill O’Reilly.