The French movie “Queen to Play” starring Kevin Kline and Sandrine Bonnaire is about a housewife/cleaning lady in her mid-forties who takes a sudden and intense interest in chess. She begins taking lessons in exchange for cleaning from the character played by Kevin Kline and begins to beat him fairly soon after that. He encourages her to play in chess tournaments and when she does, she finds if quite liberating from her life of drudgery. This movie does an excellent job of showing how the chess bug can catch people. It shows how the patterns of how the pieces move are so appealing to some people.
Chess players can become very fond of the game-even addicted to it. A healthy addiction, chess is, like exercising or eating right. I would not recommend that children view this movie without a parent, I would recommend that the parent watch the movie first all the way through so that they can edit out one thirty second scene to make sure the kids don’t watch that. But other than that one scene approximately in the middle of the movie it is a wonderful movie for chess players or people who just want to understand why people become so enamored of the game. Here is a preview of the movie.
