Terribly, Terribly Pretty

If history teaches you anything, it's this: a pretty face means pretty soon you've got trouble. This is also true of director Arnaud Desplechin's film Kings and Queen (Rois et reine), where the kings are filled with madness and the queen is bloodied and beautiful.

The film takes as its structural conceit the stories of a man and a woman who were once lovers, but now only connected by their shared past and one small child. Interwoven with these twin tales is a list of literary, film and cultural references so big and thick that Baudrillard would fall over sideways from the sheer weight of it all. Take Breakfast at Tiffany's, Godard, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hercules, Ibsen, Cassavetes -- put these in a blender, add a generous portion of Gitanes, some prescription medication, a few Sirkian overtones, one Catherine Deneuve, some deeply strange musical choices, then top with a creamy swirl of melodrama and serve immediately. Whether you will choke on this concoction or not probably depends largely on your gender.

Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) is a 35 year-old woman, an art dealer, mother, a normal appearing, functional woman, who is about to marry a man who worships her. Her life is a glossy, well-groomed affair, and she appears as sleekly confident as a particularly fashionable porpoise. But the first tiny cracks appear when she heads off to the French countryside to visit her aging father and her young son. Herein is where you begin to question the trustworthiness of this narrator. Nora's father is a famous author at work on his final diary, a book that he tells her is all about her.

Swan songs

Keep in mind that the first scene in the film shows Nora buying a print of Leda and the Swan as a present for her father. An odd choice perhaps, but why be subtle when you can hit people over the head with a giant white bird? The story of Leda is that she was raped (willingly or not -- the jury seems still out on that notion) by Zeus in the form of a swan. As a result, she had four children, one of whom was Helen (of that Troy stuff), and from Helen came all matter of hell. So if beauty unleashes operatic woes, get prepared for a swan song. When Nora discovers her father is dying from bowel cancer, she is undone by grief and decides that she needs someone to care for her son. Stories build on stories, and before long, you've wandered deeply into the realm of signs, signifiers and sins.

In the second part of the film, the inmates are running the asylum, especially at the asylum, where Nora's one-time lover Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric) has been committed against his will. Despite his hatred of the taxman, (a quality that defines him as eminently sane in my books) Ismaël doesn't appear unduly nutty; he makes some unusual sartorial choices, and he dances a mean jig, but it isn't until he opens his mouth and declares that women have no souls that his charm becomes suspect.

Still, not since The King of Hearts have we had such a lovely time in the madhouse. It is outside of its walls that things are infinitely more difficult. The innocence of madness is not especially new, nor the idea that the lunatics are really the most sane among us. There isn't much here that you haven't seen before in bits and pieces, but it is the sheer amount of things thrown together that gives the film such heft. In the interest of expediency, we shall focus on one subtext (although there are multiple choices available). In one scene, Ismaël is explaining himself to a psychiatrist played by Catherine Deneuve. He tells her, as if just realizing it himself, that she is very beautiful. Deneuve accepts this statement with a wry look, as if to say, "That's only about the ten billionth time I've heard that one."

Beauty's guilt

Beauty is a condition that implicates not only those who possess it, but those who wish to possess those who are actually beautiful in turn. Nora is surrounded by men -- her husbands, her father, and perhaps to some degree, her young son, who adore her for all the wrong reasons. Is it because they see only the surface? Or because female beauty, like that of Helen's (often cited as the daughter of Nemesis who bore the sin of pride and hubris) is the original female sin? Oh woman, thy name is vanity. That old thing again?

Would you find it easier to forgive a pretty girl or an ugly girl, the psychiatrist asks Ismaël? Yet, it is her beauty that makes Nora's moral ambiguity so compelling. She might be lovely, but is she also crazy and evil? There is evidence on both sides: she tortures her young husband, marries a man who she has little genuine affection for and snorts heroin for fun. She is not easy to like. Raised by a controlling father to be proud and emotionally reserved, Nora embodies the madness that lies beneath the smooth surface of the bourgeoisie. But if Nora is a creation of her father, in one level of fictive reality, she is also a type, another in the long line of fatale femmes so beloved by male directors. And really what would male auteurs do without their enigmatic heroines, their fallen, crazy women? There would be no Cassavetes without Gena Rowland. And here it's the same old saw -- woman, mysterious force of whatever, and all the men ravished and resentful of her. It is all so oddly convenient somehow.

It is probably unwise to draw any deeper conclusions about the nature of men and women from a French film; you could wind up in trouble. But that said, and warily stepping into the essentialist debate about men and women being different, (other than their external trappings) I think the experience of watching this film might be very different depending on your gender. The binary nature of this film, suggested even by the title, is perhaps disingenuous, but you can't help but draw contrasts throughout: outside and inside, male and female, crazy and not crazy. No scene offers up a definitive answer, but there are clues sprinkled here and there, not the least of which is the musical motifs: Webern versus Mancini.

Ciphers and ghosts

Whether Nora's beauty makes her a monster or a victim is difficult to determine. Although she is allowed to express her own views, she remains a cipher on some level, whether she is lying to herself or the unseen audience she addresses. The viewers are left to draw their own conclusions, while the ghost of the self-made Holly Golightly floats in on Moon River. My sympathy for her varied wildly throughout, and even now, I'm not truly certain how I feel about this character, or whether in fact, I feel anything at all. A clever boy is director Arnaud Desplechin, perhaps too clever.

For all the sturm und drang, this is a strangely unaffecting film. The French love their theory, mixed with generous portions of kitsch and a hearty helping of perversity. In the press notes for the film, the director is quoted as saying that his intent was to make a brutal film -- a brutal comedy and brutal love story. But the brutality stays in the film; it blows away, leaving no permanent marks. The amount of energy and thought invested in this form of intellectual exercise is self-evident, but aside from the wealth of mythological references, the self-reflexivity of Catherine Deneuve, the sheer amount of stuff that is wadded in so densely that you might want to pick it apart with a fork -- there is something suspicious here. All this sound and fury, signifying too much. The director uses art (paintings, music etc.) as a means of unspoken communication. Thus the film, as a piece of art itself, is implicated in this, too. But does the director succeed in conveying any deeper experience? Or is it a puzzle that exists merely for the sake of solving?

For all its sprawling, discursive length, there is nothing in this film that isn't suggested by Yeats' poem "Leda and the Swan," which has exactly 112 words. A willing victim, a godlike father, the collusion between the two and from this perversion comes deep and unsettling woes -- it's an odd concoction, one part hemlock to two parts froth. But I think I've seen it all before, and before and before.

Kings and Queen (Rois et reine) opens March 24-29 at the VanCity Theatre in Vancouver.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee every Friday.