Review

European Film Festival:

Joueuse

By Madeleine WIGHTMAN

Caroline Bottaro's Joueuse, plucks the game of chess out of the metaphorical realm of spy thrillers and rewrites it as a fable about relationships and upward mobility.

Adapted from Bertina Henrichs's novel The Chess Player, this slight but captivating movie (Ms. Bottaro's directorial debut) compares the strategies of chess to the erotic maneuvers in a flirtatious pas de deux.

At the same time, a woman's winning the game symbolises female empowerment in a man's world and ascent from working-class drudgery to the bourgeoisie. Hélène (Sandrine Bonnaire), the movie's sly, middle-aged Cinderella, is an attractive chambermaid at a luxury hotel in Corsica.

While going about her chores, she observes a chess game being played by an American couple (Jennifer Beals and Dominic Gould) on the balcony of their suite. Stealthy moves accompanied by insinuating eye contact culminate with the woman's defeating the man and flashing Hélène a smile of conspiratorial glee.

Hélène takes the hint, and at a birthday party for Ange, a handsome dockworker named Ange (Francis Renaud), she presents him with an electronic chess set in the hopes of reigniting the spark in their marriage. Ange is mystified and vaguely annoyed by the gift. When he expresses no interest in learning the game, Hélène begins teaching herself to play and quickly becomes obsessed.

Fairy tale

Joueuse is a lighthearted, grown-up fairy tale in which chess consumes Hélène's imagination and transforms her life. As she mops a black-and-white checkered floor, it becomes a surreal dreamscape. At a restaurant she makes chess pieces out of crumbled bread and pushes them around the squares of the red-and-white tablecloth.

The intimate looks exchanged by the characters as they compete for advantage in a game in which the queen is the most powerful piece tell us as much about them as anything they say. Sometimes chess even suggests a mental striptease in which the players shed their defenses as they exchange glances and dare each other to go forward. At other times it conjures a war between the sexes, with Hélène, the feminist upstart challenging male dominance.

Avid to learn more, she discovers a chess set in the house of Dr. Kröger (Kevin Kline, in his first entirely French-speaking role), a widowed American professor for whom she works as a part-time housekeeper. She volunteers to clean his place in exchange for weekly chess lessons. A mysterious figure suffering from an unidentified lung ailment, Kröger agrees. When, after only a few lessons, she is regularly beating him, he urges her to enter a local tournament.

In small but significant ways, Joueuse defies expectations. It dangles the possibility of an affair between Hélène and Kröger in games that the film likens to courtship. Yet their flirtation is never physically consummated. Hélène's relationships with her husband, Ange and rebellious teenage daughter, Lisa (Alexandra Gentil), undergo surprising transformations.

Ange, initially threatened by Hélène's passion, which keeps her out late and distracts her from housework, is initially so suspicious that he follows her to a lesson and spies on her. But once he realizes that she has a gift, his jealousy turns to admiration, and the flame of desire is rekindled. Lisa, who is so ashamed and contemptuous of her parents for being "poor" that she refuses to invite boyfriends to the house, becomes her mother's fervent champion.

Bonnaire's Hélène subtly evolves from a harried, resentful domestic wearing a perpetually hurt expression into a woman who discovers her power. Kevin Kline, as the haughty, secretive professor with a kind heart under a prickly exterior gives one of his finest screen performances, executed with minute fluctuations in his body language.

When Kröger finally opens up about his home life, its not a dramatic breakdown or a therapy session. It comes across as the real evolution of a friendship - not a human connection that he's been avoiding, but one he never anticipated.

And while the film very well could have explored cheap drama through an affair or by indulging in Ange's fear of an affair, the quiet game between Helene and Kröger has a sensuality to it that's far more interesting than any conventional portrayal of coupling would have been.

Themes of midlife crises and female empowerment

Using chess as the central thread of this story, Joueuse isn't a film about the game itself but rather the portrait of a woman's mid-life crisis, with light doses of social commentary in the background.

Prisoner of a life without excitement, Hélène seems to be advancing through life like a sleepwalker, stuck between her boring job as a housemaid and her family; Ange, the distant husband and Lisa, the bratty daughter. The she discovers the game which will provide her with a much-needed escape from her daily routine.

The story can easily be described as a tale of self-empowerment for women, where men are relegated to spectators of Hélène's rise. We follow her transformation, from discreet housemaid and wife to local chess star, with Kröger acting as the catalyst of her mutation.

Using Chess as a metaphor for this empowerment, the film is not particularly subtle in delivering symbols to the spectator; the dialogues between the characters underlining the messages the film carries.

At the heart of Joueuse' is obviously the role of woman in society. As we hear Hélène's coworker telling her that happiness should after all be a quiet life with a husband and kids, we know that, obviously, this isn't what Hélène or the filmmakers believe. Men such as Ange, Kröger or even her daughter's boyfriend are portrayed as unconscious barriers to women's ambitions.

Kröger even explains how he should have supported his wife's artistic aspirations (which is perhaps why he is now looking for redemption by helping Hélène).

Money

Of course, if this journey isn't about sex and money, it means that what Hélène is going through is an intellectual mid-life crisis, success at chess being one of the most obvious symbols of intellectual prowess. The story isn't as groundbreaking as it could have been 50 years ago, with so many women holding important positions in society, its impact cannot be as great.

The fact that the story is set in Corsica makes it more relevant, as women are still considered as housewives in certain Mediterranean regions. As indeed they still are in many societies. The end of the film is satisfying, when the viewer sees that Hélène has won her local tournaments, (against many men) and that she is breaking free from her social constraints and heading to Paris. "Joueuse" has a quiet beauty and is a humble achievement.

It's rules and conventions are as apparent from the beginning as those of the game depicted, but like a great game of chess, surprises occur with the most graceful of moves.