The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 9-15
Kings and Queen (2004)
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin
That Desplechin descends from the French New Wave directors is evident in his insistence on deconstructing wishful sentimentality, romanticism, and tidiness with cold amusement through subjective eccentrics. In his long, dense, and busy Kings and Queen, he deploys two of France’s finest actors—Emanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric—to brilliant effect. Devos’s multivalent gallerist Nora feigns a charmed life, when her real one is in fact deeply fraught on account of her sick father, lonely 11-year old son Elias, and emotional itinerancy. In parallel, Amalric’s unstable Ismael, her violinist ex-husband, is planning his departure from a mental hospital. She seeks relief, asking him to adopt Elias on the eve of her marriage to a rich but distant man. The film contains several transcendent moments, but Ismael’s explanation of his decision to the boy at the end of the film should be counted as one of the most subversively candid adult-child exchanges in cinema. Jonathan Stevenson (March 12, 2pm; March 17, 7pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Desplechin series)