Mon Roi, or “My King” in English, is a French romantic comedy which follows the highs and lows in the love life of a female lawyer, Tony, short for Marie-Antoinette. The film’s premise is a simple one, but it does assemble some hotshots of French cinema.
Director Maiwenn Le Besco reunites with Emmanuelle Bercot – who plays Tony – in this effort, which garnered Bercot the Best Actress award (shared with Rooney Mara for Carol) at Cannes last year for her lead role. Regular bad boy Vincent Cassel (Child 44, Black Swan, the Ocean series) for once plays a relatively mellow role as Tony’s husband Georgio. Louis Garrel acts as Tony’s protective brother Solal, who is doubtful of his sister’s choice of partner.
At the start of the film, Tony severely fractures her leg while skiing and ends up in rehab to learn how to walk again. We see that she is depressed and frustrated during physiotherapy. How long she will take to recover, we aren’t certain, but long enough for reminiscences, regret and reflections. And thus the story is told through flashbacks, as we go back in time to see how it all began with Georgio.
It was Tony who hit on him first, in a bar, and hit it off they did. Georgio, successful restaurateur with swanky apartment, seems like everything a good catch should be. Before long, marriage is on the cards, and then the relationship gets capricious, as do Tony’s moods.
Solal’s mistrust of Georgio isn’t unfounded. Even after marriage, Georgio has commitment issues with a suicidal ex-girlfriend he can’t shake off, drug problems that surface, and debts that Tony is dragged into jointly bearing as a spouse. In the midst of all these, there are the paternal urges, the kid that comes along, the arguments etc – everything that makes up marriage life as we know it.
The dialogue is razor-sharp funny in parts and we cheer Tony when the things that go wrong get set right, but as the couple uncouple and couple again, we find ourselves passengers in a car behind Tony the driver, a car that veers from right to left on a winding highway and leaves us wondering where it’s headed.
The Tony of the present, slowly but surely getting the hang of physiotherapy, will recover and walk again. However, as Tony of the past tells Georgio it’s over and she wants a divorce, and then seems to laugh at his antics all over again, we wonder – are they done with their “conscious uncoupling”- as Gwyneth Paltrow would put it? We can laugh and cry with the likeable and passionate Tony as her emotions swing from I-wanna-be-with-him to I-wanna-be-with-him-not. In the end, we find ourselves hard-pressed to share her unwillingness to get on with it. So is Georgio her beloved king or not? Please decide, Queen Marie-Antoinette.
Mon Roi (My King) opens in the theatres on 6 May 2016.
Rating: M18
Running Time: 128 minutes
Watch the trailer here:
