Rois et reine

Arnaud Desplechin’s new film is not one but two stories of the converging lives of Ismael (Mathieu Amalric) and Nora (Emmanuelle Devos). Ismael’s is a nightmarishly comic vaudeville turn, in which he is whisked away to a mental hospital where he matches wits with the administrator (a brilliantly cast Catherine Deneuve), raids the in-house pharmacy with his bug-eyed lawyer (Hippolyte Girardot) and woos a delicate young suicide survivor (Magali Woch). Nora’s story is a far more sombre affair – she’s survived her lover’s suicide, raised a son on her own and now has to contend alone with the prolonged dying of her father (magnificently acted by the great Maurice Garrel). As always, Arnaud Desplechin fearlessly explores the uncharted territory between comedy and tragedy, exhilaration and despair, belief and godlessness. His sensibility is one of the grandest in modern cinema, alternately Shakespearean, Rabelaisian, and Roth (Philip, that is)-ian. This may be his richest movie yet, so utterly alive that almost everything around it seems mummified by comparison. (KJ)