Although he prefers to conduct an interview outside to allow some tres francais cigarette smoking, writer and director Arnaud Desplechin does not come across as either enfant terrible or agent provocateur, the two default modes for branding Gallic filmmakers on these shores.
His films are mix-tape concoctions of drama and comedy, blending with head-spinning ease such disconnected topics as family dynamics and arms dealing, or philosophy and philandering.
Such madcap combinations have yet to capture the American public, but they've made him a favorite of film critics and art house programmers around the world.
His latest film, "Kings and Queen" -- it's his sixth -- has garnered rapturous notices wherever it has played and was a box office hit in France, where it received prestigious year-end awards and seven nominations for the Cesar awards (France's equivalent of the Oscars).
The film, which opens May 20, reunites Desplechin, 44, with two actors he has worked with a number of times before, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric.
This time out, Devos plays Nora, a single mother who must find someone to care for her 8-year-old son while she nurses her father through the final stage of terminal cancer. To that end she reconnects with an old boyfriend, Ismael, who has recently been committed to a psychiatric hospital.
A disaster as a couple, Nora and Ismael form an unsteady bond as friends, and through the course of the film each of them is destroyed and, in a sense, reborn.
Stuffed to the brim with literary allusions, fantasy asides and an elegantly ramshackle narrative style, the film, co-written by Desplechin and Roger Bohbot, follows a typically offbeat structural conceit.
"I had this idea to do a pure melodrama," explains Desplechin, his quiet singsong voice something of an authoritative whisper. "Nora would go through all the worst in life, the pain, the curses, the magic, all of this in one hour and seven minutes, and then all of the burlesque of Ismael also in one hour and seven minutes. They would meet just one time right in the middle of the movie and then once at the end. And we would give 12 minutes to the kid. That would be it.
"When we were writing, not when we were shooting, it didn't seem a problem to host those two things side by side. I didn't want the laughs to make a mockery of the tears or for the tears to overwhelm the laughs. Would they agree to jump from one story line to the other?"
