PSYCHOLOGICAL CHESS MATCH IN `KINGS'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

ARNAUD Desplechin's ``Kings and Queen'' has everything you could want in a French art movie:

Interesting characters who reveal multiple facets of themselves as the story twists along.

All kinds of references to classic myth, cinema and literature, much of it obscurely connected.

Bold tonal and stylistic swings, from the most harrowing psychological tragedy to wacky farce.

Catherine Deneuve at her haughty best.

Yet with all that and much more, ``K and Q'' left me cold. Maybe those tonal swings were a little too bold, or perhaps the characters, for all their flaws and behavioral surprises, just didn't turn into people whose fates mattered to me.

I'm hedging this opinion because, by any measure of objective criticism, an intelligent story is being told here in a very artful manner. That's quite a worthy accomplishment. I think, though, that Desplechin (``My Sex Life ... or How I Got Into an Argument'') got too carried away with his flights of angsty fancy to really invest us in his characters' lives.

They are eventful lives, though, no question. Sometimes narrator Nora (the terrific Emmanuelle Devos from ``Read My Lips'') at first comes off as a likably upfront, if slightly self-satisfied Parisian gallery owner. But the impending death of her author father, Jennsens (Maurice Garrel), not only throws her comfortable life into a tizzy but also opens the floodgates to shocking flashbacks and ghostly visitations from failed relationships. Not to mention a parental betrayal so horrible we can't help but think it must be, to some extent, deserved.

Nora grows desperate to get an official father on the books for her loved but neglected 10-year-old son, Elias (Valentin Lelong). Though not the boy's father, Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), her divorced second husband, was the only lover who ever got along with Elias. Trouble is, the neurotic viola player can't officially adopt the kid, as he's being held against his will in the kind of mental- health facility that permits drinking, sex between patients and staff, and raids with your tax lawyer on the hospital pharmacy. Deneuve, who is only in a handful of scenes, seems to be the head psychiatrist.

Running along two narrative tracks, with some bothersome jumps back in time, Nora's story grows more tragic as Ismael's moves from absurdity to arbitrariness to occasional, outright implausibility. Side characters, some better drawn than others, for the most part do awful things to the highly tarnished protagonists.

The best scenes involve how Nora and Ismael respond to these intimate and professional betrayals. The circumstances may not always be persuasive, but Devos and Amalric's reactive emotions usually are. They're what draw us, if anything, into the intellectual fun house/hothouse that ``Kings and Queen'' turns out to be.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

KINGS AND QUEEN - Three stars

(Not rated: nudity, language, violence)

Starring: Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Magali Woch, Maurice Garrel, Catherine Deneuve, Hippolyte Girardot.

Director: Arnaud Desplechin.

Running time: 2 hr. 30 min.

Playing: Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles; Edwards University Town Center, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Strange mix of tragedy and wackiness is a bold study of multilayered characters and complicated relationships, but tones can be too contradictory for the film's good. In French with English subtitles.