FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL: Sandrine Bonnaire, the French actress who has done fine work for the likes of Patrice Leconte (Intimate Strangers) and Jacques Rivette (Secret Defence) delivers a comprehensively detailed performance in debutante director Caroline Bottaro’s Queen to Play, which is screening as part of the French Film Festival. There are no grand gestures or lunging moods in her portrayal of a woman approaching middle age who finds an unexpected release in studying chess, instead Bonnaire delivers on the character’s growth, catching small victories and the tough choices that are required to hold your place in various cloistered worlds, be they a marriage or a small community.
Helene (Bonnaire) is a Corsican woman approaching middle age whose satisfaction simply arises from keeping the wheels turning. She lives a nominally content working class life, marring to Ange (Francis Renaud), a ship worker, and raising an increasingly independent teenage daughter, Maria (Valerie Lagrange). In her mornings she works in a hotel, in the afternoon she cleans homes, and in the evening she tends to her family; she can sense the days becoming weeks becoming months as ritual takes hold.
Change comes when she enters the room of an American couple – Jennifer Beals and Dominic Gould – who play a game of chess on the balcony as she tidies their lodgings. The game is played with precise movements on the board and languid gestures between the players – it is a contest and a seduction, one that awakens Helene. At first she wears the American woman’s negligee after she leaves it behind, but it is chess and not lingerie that satisfies her. Helene buys a baffled Ange a computer chess set for his birthday and then monopolises it at night, studying the 64 squares in a way she would never do with her own life.
Bottaro, who has graduated from screenwriting, doesn’t overplay her scenario. The mood never resorts to the whimsical or eccentric, instead focusing on how even a simple interest in a common hobby upends the life Helene has made. As soon as she starts visiting one of her cleaning clients, the reclusive Dr Kroger (Kevin Kline), to play once a week her fellow townsfolk assume she is having an affair. Kline, working without pause in French, offers a still counterpoint to Bonnaire. Kroger is prickly and undemonstrative, with Kline letting the merest hint of light through the chinks in the character’s armour. Their relationship is nominally platonic, but involved. Bottaro refuses to pigeonhole Helene as a woman who merely needs a physical release. Here the intellectual is just as important.
'No-one can save anyone else," Kroger tells Helene, and that is the film’s philosophy. As wry changes come to the protagonist’s life – she changes her hair to match the American tourist’s and stops being accommodating to the requests of others – she brightens. Life comes into her features and Bonnaire shows us a nervous sparkle. The picture doesn’t focus on the mechanics of Chess, but lets us see how the need to think and plan both fascinates and terrifies Helene. It builds to a scene of tension and triumph, when Kroger insists Helene, who has been beating him, enter a local tournament, but the real victory is allowing herself to enter a world not her own, with the support of her family and friends. She has checkmated her inhibitions.
