text: "Rois et Reine" is a sprawling mess of a movie which will probably irritate as many viewers as it delights. It focuses by turns on ex-lovers Nora (Emanuelle Devos)and Ismael (Mathieu Amalric) as they each confront a major crisis in their now separate lives. While Nora's story is played straight and is sombre in tone, Ismael's is played mainly for laughs, although it's not particularly funny. Nora's crisis is triggered by the terminal illness of her father Louis (Maurice Garrel), and Ismael's by his sudden incarceration in a mental hospital at the instigation of a mysterious third party. Ismael and Louis are just two of the males who have shaped Nora's life, and in turn have been shaped by her, the most notable others being her now deceased first lover Pierre and their young son Elias. As events past and present are played out for the audience, and the ex-lovers become involved in each other's lives once more, it gradually emerges that Nora's personal take on her life story may be less reliable than first meets the eye.<br /><br />Cult director Arnaud Desplechin has fashioned a considerable oddity here, one which has garnered major plaudits in France. He wilfully eschews established narrative convention and develops the movie via a series of dramatic shifts in mood and tone. Had this approach been founded on a coherent unifying core idea or theme it might have worked, but it's not clear in the end what exactly Desplechin's film is actually about. Heavy-handed allusions to Greek mythology and Freudian theory are evidently freighted with meaning but, at least for this unschooled movie-goer, remain less than helpful in illuminating and interpreting the lives of the characters. At other times the treatment lapses into kitsch but the use of the anodyne "Moon River" as the film's theme tune suggests this is probably deliberate.<br /><br />**Spoiler alert** I suspect a major theme of the movie is the not very original observation that how we see ourselves can differ radically from how others see us or even how we think others see us. This idea is most obviously represented in the film by the violent death of Pierre and the revelation contained in Louis' secret diary, but unfortunately both events seem entirely disconnected from what has otherwise been revealed to the audience of Pierre and Louis' respective relationships with Nora. This seems a cheat on Desplechin's part, as if he is thrusting the idea upon us in unmediated form rather than illustrating it more subtly in the natural course of the narrative. One or two darkly surreal touches imply the presence of an alternative but largely unconscious world of persons stripped frighteningly bare, but again these are felt more as pretentious intrusions of film-making technique rather than eruptions from a deeper reservoir of truth inherent in the story. In fact, for all its heavy-handed hints at depth, the characters are curiously undeveloped and unnuanced, as if they function more as ciphers for their creator's many ideas about people rather than as real people in their own right. Much of the detail of their lives seems arbitrarily applied rather than organic. For example, Ismael, as we are constantly reminded, is a viola player, but more than two hours pass before we actually see or hear him play, and the effect of his chosen instrument or profession upon his personality is never elaborated. Hence, he may just as well be a marine biologist or a trapeze artist. <br /><br />Amalric brings a certain manic charm to the unhinged but ultimately sane Ismael, but I found Devos cloying and monotone (which may be intentional, however) as the elusive Nora. Meanwhile Jean-Paul Roussillon as Ismael's father, Elsa Wolliaston as his psychoanalyst and Magalie Woch as the psychically wounded but defiant Sinologist he befriends in hospital make the biggest impact amongst the supporting actors. Catherine Deneuve's in it, too, though her role is little more than a self-referential cameo.<br /><br />Ultimately, "Rois et Reine" is very much an acquired taste. Should it fail to push your buttons, it's very likely that Desplechin's undisciplined and florid approach will frustrate and exasperate even as you somehow keep watching.