Rois et reine

2004, France, directed by Arnaud Desplechin

I'm writing about Rois et reine so long after actually seeing the film that beyond noting how much I enjoyed Desplechin's intersecting stories, and his wonderful gallery of actors (even if several scenes occasionally have the feel of acting exercises rather than contributions to the film's progress), it seems entirely unfair to stitch together half-remembered ideas.

Instead, I'll admit that I have a terribly hard time being especially critical about any film that features the lovely Emmanuelle Devos, who I met once in Paris many years ago. She was friendly with my French "older sister", also an actress (they studied together), and I spent a happy day in the bicentennial summer of 1989 being shown the sights by Laure and Emmanuelle. The latter wasn't in the least famous at that point - she had a couple of very minor film credits on her CV - but she was already the object of much admiration from a fifteen-year-old Irish boy, who was inspired to make on-the-spot improvements in his French to impress a woman almost ten years his senior.
She was more than likely aware of the fact that I was besotted with her, and was good-sported about it. Back in those pre-Internet days, I had no idea of her growing profile as an actress so it was quite a surprise to see her onscreen three years later in Arnaud Desplechin's first full-length film La Sentinelle, the initial, very public, flowering of her career; the film, somewhat incongruously, projected me back to that sunny Paris day, as we ate sandwiches with our backs against I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramid.