LES VOLEURS Movie Review

Thieves

You keep hoping that this plot-heavy, complicated new film from the gifted André Téchiné is going to reward you mightily for the effort of adding it all up as it races along, jumping back-and-forth through time and defining the relationships between characters in tiny increments. It turns out to be a perfectly OK little thriller, but you can't dismiss that nagging voice in your ear at the end, asking “is that all there is?” Daniel Auteuil is a cop whose brother is murdered at the film's opening, and Catherine Deneuve is a troubled professor of philosophy whose connection with the dead man—and with a young thief—is established gradually as Auteuil's investigation proceeds. Téchiné gives us characters who are battered by life and circumstance, and who are considerably more than simple cliches; yet the fragmented shape he imposes on the movie gets in the characters' way, and it keeps us from becoming deeply involved with their uniformly grim situations. At a certain point we lower our expectations for the movie and simply want to find out what happened, and we are left to wonder if the kaleidoscopic editing isn't simply a fancy wrapping for a tale not particularly worth telling. (To see Téchiné, Auteuil, and Deneuve working together at peak form, take a look at their extraordinary 1993 Ma Saison Préférée.)

NEXT STOP … Wild Reeds, Ma Saison Préférée, L.627

1996 (R) 116m/C FR Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Laurence Cote, Benoit Magimel, Didier Bezace, Fabienne Babe, Ivan Desny, Julien Riviere; D: Andre Techine; W: Andre Techine, Gilles Taurand; C: Jeanne Lapoirie; M: Philippe Sarde. Nominations: Cesar Awards '97: Best Actress (Deneuve), Best Director (Techine), Best Film. VHS, LV COL