“Impedimenta: (noun, plural). Objects, such as baggage, that impede or encumber.” Whether emotional or physical, impedimenta are those things that drag people down, but that they cannot do without – memories and people that are painful to remember, but impossible to forget. They are the very essence of the film “Kings and Queen,” a recent French melodrama that is steadily infiltrating art house theatres and gaining the ecstatic approval of critics across the nation.

“Kings and Queen” follows the lives of two former lovers over the period of a week. Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) is a successful, but icy, single mother working at a trendy Parisian art gallery. She returns home to the countryside to visit her father (Maurice Garrel), a novelist who is in the late stages of terminal stomach cancer. Isma