In French with English subtitles. Starring Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric. Unrated. Opens Friday. March 24, at the Vancity Theatre

It's a sad comment on the state of auteurism in North America that since the 1960s heyday of the nouvelle vague, the only French filmmaker with any New World name recognition is Luc Besson-and he's more like a Gallic Cecil B. DeMille than a reincarnated Jean-Luc Godard.

Arnaud Desplechin is one of the most distinguished of these locally unknown new-wave inheritors, and Kings and Queen is probably his finest film. Divided into two parts and a long (some might say too long) epilogue, this two-and-a-half-hour feature follows the emotional entanglements of two very different people: Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a 35-year-old single mother who hopes to blot out the memory of a tragic past in the arms of a new, well-to-do husband, and Ismaíƒ «l (Mathieu Amalric), her former companion, a talented but tetched musician who is locked up in a mental hospital for a variety of reasons, including massive tax evasion. Their two very different trajectories threaten to reconverge at several points in the narrative, but they never quite do. Instead, they show us just how complicated interpersonal relationships can be and how the hang-ups of the past are inevitably visited on the hopes of the present.

What makes the film so diabolically clever is that virtually the same things happen to each character, only in Nora's case they arrive in the shape of tragedy, and in Ismaíƒ «l's in the form of farce. Even more subtly, the director has brought New York steam to the streets of Paris, redesigned French police uniforms, and invented luxuries that are entirely unknown on French trains. Indeed, Desplechin went so far as to mess with the geographical locations of two of the film's satellite cities, Grenoble and Roubaix.

Kings and Queen is also replete with Catholic and Jewish theology, philosophical speculations, literary quotations, mythological illustrations, great and incredibly diverse music, videotaped confessions, memories of questionable veracity, a very young ghost, and two imposing female psychiatrists (one played by Elsa Woliaston, the other by Catherine Deneuve).

The director has repeatedly told interviewers that although he envies and admires Ismaíƒ «l, he identifies more strongly with his female protagonist. "Nora is everybody," he explained. "That's why she gets to tell the story."