This is from 2018; the online information about Sonia Millot is no longer available, and I cannot vouch for the accuracy regarding this playwright below!
_The Mad Kings_ may not be a great film but it is certainly powerful. The opening -- muscle car driving over an animal's carcass on a road to nowhere -- plays like David Lynch on steroids, and it only gathers more speed, dead bodies, and primal fury from there. It succeeds in being operatic without resorting to supernatural or Freudian cliches, unlike in much of Lynch.
Writer-director Laurent Laffargue and co-writer Frederique Moreau apparently adapted the story from Sonia Millot's play _Casteljaloux_. Both Millot and Laffargue grew up in that sleepy commune close to Bordeaux, where buying your own butcher shop is a crowning achievement. Jacky Chichinet (ex-soccer star Eric Cantona) is doing just that, and wants to marry the town beauty Chantal (Celine Sallette) into the bargain. The passionate Chantal toils as a cashier by day and teaches Tartuffe and Moliere to young wannabe actors on the side. With her miniskirts and Shakespeare poster in the kitchen, she is clearly too glamorous for him, for Casteljaloux, and for all the communes miles from there. The Romy Schneider-winning actress is a French Carmen Maura; she effortlessly conveys a world weariness beyond her years. But life's disappointments can be held at bay if you wear adoring gazes.
The idyll, such as it is, lies shattered when her old flame Jeannot (Sergei Lopez) rides into town. He is a hard-drinking ex-con, romantic, charming, but prone to shocking violence. While scheming to win back Chantal, he falls in with his buddy-in-crime. His sister (I think?) sends him job interviews and tries to steer him out of trouble. Romane Bohringer has played her share of crazy, wildly romantic youths (_Total Eclipse_, _Savage Nights_); here she is almost unrecognizable as the gaunt, prim, religious single mother trying to hold the center. Her troubled son is in Chantal's class. He could have been Jeannot's boy; he is charismatic and theatrical, and shares a girl with his sidekick buddy.
There is obvious parallel between the two love-triangles and the generations. Will the son sublimate his passion into art, redeems himself and Casteljaloux, or turn violent like Jeannot, who ends up re-enacting a passion play right out of _The Iliad_? Playwright Millot is a local theater actress, puppeteer, and part-time teacher, and the stark choices and dilemmas facing these characters stuck in backwater towns feel fiercely person, even if she is not listed in the film credits.
