Queen of Hearts

(Dronningen, May el-Toukhy, Denmark, 2019)

I watched Queen of Hearts because I was curious to discover Catherine Breillat’s source for her terrific comeback Last Summer (2023) – the project was offered to her by producer Saïd Ben Saïd, who had bought the remake rights. In Murielle Joudet’s superb interview book Je ne crois qu’en moi (Capricci, 2023), Breillat remarks that it’s a veritable “classroom case study: beginning from a basically identical script, two films emerge that are absolutely unalike”. And the comparison between them is indeed illuminating.

The narrative, as Breillat breezily indicates, is substantially the same, and some dialogues are virtually identical – with one huge change to the ending, which I won’t give away here. In Queen of Hearts (co-scripted by director May el-Toukhy and Maren Louise Käehne), Anne (Trine Dyrholm) is a lawyer who defends young victims of sexual abuse. Her husband, Peter (Magnus Krepper), brings his estranged teenage son from a previous marriage, Gustav (Gustav Lindh), into the home to share their family life (the couple have had two further children of their own, both girls – in Breillat, they are younger, Asian, and adopted).

What nobody counted on is the sexual attraction that manifests between Anne and Gustav. As in a steely ‘bourgeois domesticity’ thriller (of sorts) by Claude Chabrol, the social fabric then agonisingly unravels on the basis of this transgression/misdemeanour.

For me, the difference between the films is almost the difference between cinema and television – although Queen of Hearts is not, in fact, a telemovie. (The same goes for the couplet of Alain Corneau’s Crime d’amour [2010] and Brian De Palma’s Passion [2012].) Where Breillat’s is all intense highpoints, sudden transitions and wayward emotions, el-Toukhy spends a great deal of time and space setting scenes out, building them up, and making sure we’ve imbibed the intended mood and meaning before moving on to the next agenda item. The buzzword sleek – which can also mean slick – comes easily to gratified reviewers. The lazy 21C genre label of Nordic or Scandi Noir cannot be far away …

An odd affectation – but one shared by many contemporary movies in an ambient horror-thriller vein, such as Smile (Parker Finn, 2022) – bookends the style adopted by el-Toukhy: moody shots of natural landscapes (thickets of tall, slightly billowing trees are a particular fave) scored to ‘disquieting’, long-held string quartet vibratos (nobody ever manages to do these better than Antoine Duhamel did them back in 1965 for Pierrot le fou), often with a meaningless, slow zoom into … what, an especially revealing tree?

But there’s never anything to really see in these shots, it’s all laboured mood stuff. Ryusuke Hamaguchi enlivens the procedure somewhat in Evil Does Not Exist (2023 – not, however, among his best). El-Toukhy gives the house-mode a literal twist: she repeats a screw-tilt (or whatever the heck that movement is called) view of the surrounding leafy environs that takes the camera from upside-down to right side up while the music grinds on … How disturbing!

But there is one absolutely terrific long-take shot, a genuine anthological moment of mise en scène, with the camera positioned looking out the back of a parked car: slowly, each family member appears, rising up into the frame and some exiting it, until eventually the vehicle takes off, showing those left behind getting smaller in the picture – memory of an immortal moment in Maurice Pialat’s TV series La maison des bois (1971), and with the same invocatory aura of ceremonial inevitability. El-Toukhy’s attempt, later on, to offer a static reprise of this as a delayed counter-shot – the camera looking at the weary bodies tromping up the path – isn’t half as effective.

Pascal Bonitzer worked with Breillat on the adaptation of Queen of Hearts into Last Summer. Curiously, even as the remake compresses and elides so much of what’s in the original, it also plots a few basic points better in conventional verisimilitude and cause-effect terms: for example, Anne buying Théo (the renamed Gustav) a laptop computer in the hope of weaning him off his mobile phone obsession makes more sense than the sudden impulse-purchase in Queen of Hearts. And the phone business is part of a carefully progressive series of steps whereby the bodies of adult and adolescent gradually get closer and intermingle – far more effective than the usual Hollywood ‘incidental clinch’ (such as applying a Band-Aid!) or the more abrupt approach that el-Toukhy takes.

It’s in the characters – less a matter of depth-psychological characterisation than immediate, on-screen states and behaviour – that the difference between the films really tells. Everything is pretty simple in Queen of Hearts: Peter is just a nice, eventually very confused husband; and Gustav is an ordinary, gormless teen following enhanced hormonal arousal. And the sidebar figures (such as Anne’s legal clients) are just intermittent subplots, beyond the basic genuflection to the conflict of Law and Desire as a theme (Breillat truly warms to this idea). Nothing like the poignant role of Pierre as an older husband (“I’m a gerontophile”, deadpans Anne) with complex reactions to what goes down in Last Summer – let alone the Pasolinian storm incarnated in the looks, tears and movements of Théo.

El-Toukhy’s focus is almost entirely on Anne: her emotions, motivations and behaviour. Dyrholm’s strong performance responds to that primacy. Breillat says that she made the boy “the desiring one”, and wanted to avoid the assumption of Anne as predator. El-Toukhy sets a more familiar, stereotypical polarity. The Danish title means The Queen (I guess that was already taken by Stephen Frears in English-language cinema) and that’s what she is presented as, in all respects: determined, taking the initiative, aggressive or even violent when she needs to be.

It’s Anne who, unambiguously, starts the sexual relationship with Gustav – in a scene more graphic (though less truly provocative) than anything in Breillat’s version, she sucks the kid to get him up, then gets on all fours for prolonged penetration. None of the fascinated (and fascinating), abstracting, long-held facial close-ups during sex that light up Last Summer!

© Adrian Martin 28 April 2024