FACE | The Tournees Festival | ROIS ET REINE

ROIS ET REINE
KINGS AND QUEEN

Director:
Arnaud Desplechin

Screenplay:
Arnaud Desplechin
Roger Bohbot

Cast:
Ismael: Mathieu Amalric
Nora: Emmanuelle Devos
Elias: Valentin Lelong
Abel: Jean-Paul Roussillon
Jennsens: Maurice Garrel
Mme Vasset: Catherine Deneuve

Awards:
Best Actor (Mathieu Amalric), César Awards (2005)
Best Film, French Syndicate of Cinema Critics (2005)
Prix Louis Delluc (2004)

Running time: 150’
Production: France, 2004
Rating: Not Rated (brief nudity)
Gauge: 35mm, DVD (color)

Distributor:
New Yorker Films

“Desplechin gives these characters the time to develop, to display their nuances, to establish their relationships with each other, to talk out their destinies.”
Stephen Hunter, Washington Post



Arnaud Desplechin once again traverses the uncharted distance between comedy and tragedy with this exhilarating work of intersecting lives and family connections. Invoking everything from Shakespeare and Hitchcock to Moby Dick, the film is a heartbreaking, hilarious melodrama of the intrigues and entanglements of ex-spouses Nora and Ismaël. Ismaël is a disheveled, neurotic musician who descends into a comic nightmare when he is committed to a mental hospital by a mysterious third party. He spars with the steely clinic psychiatrist, bursts forth with impromptu break-dancing sessions, and attempts to woo a still-fragile suicide survivor. Vivacious art dealer and single mother, Nora is struggling to rise above the calamities of her own romantic life and the looming death of her ailing father by marrying an icy Parisian businessman. Because her young son dislikes her fiancé, Nora tries to convince Ismaël to adopt the child. With its vivid references to mythology, literature, and cinema, Kings and Queen is an astonishingly original and thoroughly entertaining take on modern relationships.

PHOTO New Yorker Films

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