At once erudite and omnivorous, Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen is ambitious, dazzling and overwrought, a vast but intimate diptych that has been greeted in some quarters with the enthusiasm usually reserved for water in the desert. Rife with allusions to mythology and popular culture, its soundtrack ranging from classical music to hip-hop, Kings positively teems with life. In recent interviews, Desplechin has said that his motto for the movie was a quote from François Truffaut: "Every minute, four ideas." At two and a half hours, that's 600 ideas in all, so it's not surprising they don't all work. But by setting his sights higher than virtually all of his contemporaries, Desplechin can be forgiven for falling slightly short.

Desplechin calls one of Kings and Queen's stories comic and the other tragic, but the distinction has more to do with the protagonists' perspectives than their situations. Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a regal, glacial beauty, certainly has plenty to cry about: Her first marriage ended in death, her second in divorce, and she's about to marry a wealthy but indifferent man whom she knows she does not love, all while absorbing the news that her father (Maurice Garrell) has terminal cancer and will die in a matter of weeks. But Ismaél (Mathieu Amalric), frizzy-haired and garrulous, has plenty of reason to worry as well: He's been committed to a mental institution at the request of an unknown third party, he's about to lose his job as a concert violinist, and he keeps a noose dangling in one room of his cluttered apartment — just to prove he isn't suicidal, as he tells the men who come to commit him. (Not surprisingly, they are unconvinced.)

Charlie Chaplin said that life was a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in long shot, but the difference between Kings and Queen's two stories is less a matter of an overriding aesthetic than what works at any given moment (a pronounced difference from Desplechin's mood-driven Esther Kahn). Generally, Ismaél's story moves at a quicker, more antic pace, and focuses on his confrontations with female authority figures, including two psychiatrists memorably played by Catherine Deneuve and Elsa Woliaston (the latter named Devereux, after the pivotal ethnopsychiatrist). Nora's, by contrast, moves inward; her conflicts, largely with men, take place inside her head. Her late ex-husband (Jean-Paul Roussillon) materializes in a hospital corridor to revisit the moment of his death (ruled a suicide, although Nora's role is ambiguous), and her father returns after his death to deliver a withering assessment of his daughter's character in a Bergmanesque monologue that's either a masterstroke or a high-level miscalculation.

The trouble with Kings and Queen is that there's no middle ground: Desplechin tries so much so fast that it verges on dilettantism. The references come faster than they can possibly be processed, let alone absorbed: Is Nora anything like the heroine of A Doll's House, or Ismaél like the narrator of Moby-Dick? And why name one of the movie's three sections "From Among the Dead," after Vertigo's source novel, when the movie lacks any character similar to Jimmy Stewart's impotent ex-cop? At times, it seems as if Desplechin is merely working down a checklist of his favorite things, making sure to cram them in even if they don't fit. (The guards who commit Ismaél, unnamed on screen, are referred to in the credits as Prospero and Caliban.) Most reviews of Kings and Queen complain that the movie is too long, but to me, it seems too short, a banquet wolfed down at the pace of a snack.

For all Desplechin's intellectual fireworks, the movie is often best when he focuses on his splendidly cast actors, not just Devos and the crackling Amalric, but Magalie Woch as Ismaél's volatile fellow patient (called "la Chinoise" for her interest in Asian languages, another reference to a Desplechin fave). While Nora's plight lacks the stature or the universality to qualify as "mythic," a quality Desplechin and Devos have both attributed to her, she comports herself with a sad (and eventually deadly) stillness that jars productively with Amalric's angular jitters in their few scenes together.

In the summer when Sally Potter's Yes has been savaged for its rhyming dialogue, it's odd that Desplechin's far more pretentious and less coherent work has drawn near-universal praise. Perhaps its melodramatic subject matter raises fewer hackles than Potter's explicitly political work, or critics are simply more comfortable with a male director's extravagance than a female's precision. That's not to say Kings and Queen doesn't deserve its plaudits. But Desplechin's myth-making extends further than his characters, and his wild-haired self-portrait starts to crack if you handle it too closely.

Kings and Queen Written and directed by Arnaud Desplechin A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse recommended