QUEEN TO PLAY

I have always loved how French movie makers  stretch their imaginations when it comes to dealing with ‘amour’, but using an obsession with chess to help a repressed housewife rekindle her sexuality was just a tad too far fetched for me. 

Helene is a chambermaid in a luxury hotel in Corsica and after a putting a full day of work in, she goes home to her dockworker husband who ignores her and choses to spend all his spare time playing cards at his pal’s house.  One day at the Hotel Helene spots a couple playing chess and really having fun at it. And she gets hooked just like that! For some reason she thinks that this could be the way to get her husband interested in hanging out with her again, so she buys him an electronic chess set for his birthday.  It goes down like a lead balloon!

Helene meanwhile has a second part time job house cleaning for a very grumpy widowed American Professor who she persuades to teach her how to play chess properly. He does and she finds she has a real talent for it and actually ends up playing and winning tournaments.  Which is just as well, as her husband up to the moment Helene starts coming home late, hardly notices her at all. He (like me) can hardly believe that chess is the sole reason for the new spring in his wife’s step so he starts secretly following her.  The Professor may have a wee crush on his maid, but she’s just in love with chess.  Oh yes, and her husband too.

This odd wee movie is made watchable by the wonderful Sandrine Bonnaire who is a joy as the obsessed Helene, although why any husband would ever want to ignore a treasure of a attractive wife like this is a mystery to me.  So too was the casting decision to put Kevin Kline in his first French movie as the Professor with the ailing lung problem.  I really cannot think what was remotely remarkable in his performance that justified having a major American star in this unassuming small French movie.

Not a bad movie (thanks to Ms Bonnaire) but not one worth going out of one’s way for, unless you think that chess is the way you could get your man back in bed with you too.

★★★★★★