She has the face of a mermaid--a real one, not a Disney blonde. The wide undulant mouth drinks in her world like oxygen; the hazel eyes reflect a bent and wavering light. The hair is wavy, of course, but also dark, weighty, enveloping, so that it looks more drenched than flowing. The luminous skin must be cool to the touch. No one with any sense would call this woman pretty; she's too beautifully unsettled for that.

He, on the other hand, is almost handsome, in a pinch-faced, unkempt, rodent-eyed, moss-toothed, dithering, vituperative, abandoned kind of way. You wonder that such a trim little man should persist in treating the entire world as a locked door, and himself as a battering ram. You marvel, once you've grown accustomed to his base level, that he never looks much worse for the blows. At times he even manages to dress with dash--although then, too, he overdoes things, alarming people by wrapping himself in the red cloak of a Renaissance duelist.

She is Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), the tragic heroine of Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen. He is Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric), the film's comic hero. That two such characters should be able to coexist tells you most of what you need to know about Desplechin's uncontainable talent. His mind operates in bursts: unpredictable, overlapping flares of realism, fantasy, slapstick, pathos, poetry, suspense, which light up a broader emotional terrain than you'll find in any ten other movies this month. As with his mélange of genres, so too with his visual style--the way he cuts quickly, jumps through multiple views of a subject, pores over faces with a hand-held camera, changes the lighting in midscene. This abundance, which at times seems no more discriminating than life itself, impresses you at once. How could it not, when the musical score encompasses Anton Webern, Henry Mancini and a crew of French hip-hoppers?

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