RIEN NE VA PLUS / THE SWINDLE (60)

Directed by: Claude Chabrol

Starring: Michel Serrault, Isabelle Huppert, Francois Cluzet

The Pitch: A pair of confidence tricksters - elderly veteran and younger female cohort - get involved in an increasingly convoluted scam.

Theo Sez: Chabrol in playful form, though Serrault, doing a variation on his fastidious misanthrope from NELLY AND M. ARNAUD (and looking more than ever like Michel Simon) is most of the show - typifying the film's air of patrician roi s-amuse as well as its wry acknowledgment that people will often do incredible things for ludicrous reasons ("I adore the mystery of human relationships"). Puns and red herrings abound, playing with the conventions of cinematic puzzles (briefcases being switched and the like), teasing us with an apparently arbitrary nationality motif (our hero mistaken (why?) for a Pole, emphasis laid on otherwise irrelevant minor characters being German or Belgian) till we start to suspect the real game of chance (or swindle, to borrow the film's American title) may well refer to the New Europe's impending homogenisation. Fair far-fetched fun, excusing itself through a clip from a life-stranger-than-fiction TV show and seguing nicely into BEAT THE DEVIL territory for its climax - which however is overstretched and rather unpleasant, with a weak coda tacked on ; proof perhaps that frivolity doesn't really suit this naturally mordant director. Chabrol relaxed is, alas, Chabrol de-Claude ; still under-rated, though.