LES VOLEURS / THIEVES (73)

Directed by: Andre Techine

Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Laurence Cote

The Pitch: The death of a small-time crook, as refracted through the people affected by it - his son, his girlfriend, his estranged brother.

Theo Sez: The most mysterious of this director's recent movies, and perhaps the most beguiling. The opening, focusing on a child, recalls SCENE OF THE CRIME from ten years ago, and it's clear that Techine has become a much tighter, more craftsmanlike - if no less opaque - director in the interim : he's adept at ending a scene just before you'd expect him to, keeping the momentum going, and he uses found music brilliantly (an Arabic song on the radio, a cabaret act performing "Money Makes the World Go Round"), adding layers of atmosphere and irony. Above all, of course, there's the way he interweaves strands, juxtaposing characters and alternating narrators not so much for contrast as to chart and observe their interaction - like Altman or Kieslowski he seems fascinated by the idea of lives impinging on each other (even the opening credits are set to a babble of voices all talking at once). It makes you wish someone could nudge Techine in the direction of "The Sound and the Fury" or "As I Lay Dying" - except that you also wonder if he could do justice to Faulkner's passion and brutality. Like all his films (that I've seen) this is a strangely tentative experience, deliberately obscure and inconclusive ; in fact it may be even colder than the others, with even Auteuil doing pretty much a variation on his role from A HEART IN WINTER (maybe it's just the seasonal motif in MA SAISON PREFEREE, but I can't help finding an autumnal feel to that movie and a wintry feel to this one, with perhaps WILD REEDS as the budding springtime of adolescence ; though I can't even imagine what a Techine "summer" movie would be like). Fortunately it's also an exceptionally haunting film, and a beautifully crafted one. Do I have any idea what if anything it all "means"? Not really. Would I watch it again? Like a shot.