Petit larceny

Téchiné's Thieves steals your mind

by Steve Vineberg

Directed by André Téchiné. Screenplay by Téchiné, Gilles Taurand, Michel Alexandre, and Pascal Bonitzer. With Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Laurence Cote, Didier Bezace, Julien Rivière, Naguime Bendidi, and Benoît Magimel. Opens Friday at the Avon.

Among current French filmmakers, André Téchiné possesses both the most dazzling technique and the most complex and intriguing sensibility. Even early on in his career (his first movie, French Provincial, came out in the mid-'70s), his work displayed a command of film vocabulary that even gifted directors acquire only gradually, and he presented it playfully, as the New Wave moviemakers used to. Moreover, his experiments in narrative, like theirs, are as thoroughly grounded in literature as in film. The beginning of Scene of the Crime, for example, echoes the opening scenes of Dickens's Great Expectations, and last year's My Favorite Season felt like a beautifully modulated novella. In his new Thieves (Les voleurs), the shifting point of view recalls Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

Scene of the Crime and My Favorite Season are two of Téchiné's best pictures. I'm not so wild about his Thieves, where his narrative approach isn't just challenging but exasperating, because ultimately it doesn't seem to yield very much. The central event in the film is the death of a Lyon club owner named Ivan (Didier Bezace), a low-level gangster who was shot while stealing cars from an auto-assembly plant. Thieves begins in the consciousness of Ivan's son Justin (Julien Rivière), a little toughie who appears destined to grow up like his dad; then it switches to the point of view of Justin's uncle, Alex (Daniel Auteuil), a cop who's sexually involved with one of his brother's employees, Juliette (Laurence Cote). The film also embraces Juliette's point of view, and that of Marie (Catherine Deneuve), her one-time philosophy professor and current lover. The plot is relatively simple, but Téchiné's way of telling it, moving in and out of the heads these four characters and back and forth in time, complicates it -- for reasons that the movie never makes clear.

Téchiné's long since lost the playfulness of his early movies. I don't miss it much when he does something like My Favorite Season (which also stars Deneuve and Auteuil, actors whose work for him is consistently excellent), an intricate and endlessly revealing study of family dynamics. I do miss it in a film like Wild Reeds, his portrait of adolescent sexuality, where the painful self-seriousness of the characters seems to have infected Téchiné himself, and in Thieves, where the somber tone is relentless. I couldn't figure out why everyone on screen except the club owner's widow is so unremittingly sour-faced and unpleasant, and why no one ever cracks a joke. Another puzzle: the premise of the story -- two brothers on opposite sides of the law -- is so familiar from Hollywood gangster pictures of the '30s and '40s that you assume Téchiné must be planning to score off it in some way -- to have fun with it -- but there's no payoff. If his first movies weren't so densely layered with movie references, you'd think he hadn't noticed what a cliché the brothers' conflict is.

Although there's nothing to fault in the performances of Auteuil, Deneuve, and Laurence Cote, Téchiné doesn't seem to want us to read the characters' behavior. (No one I've spoken to has been able to interpret a quasi-incestuous sequence involving Juliette and her brother Jimmy, played by Benoît Magimel). After a while you grow tired of the effort, and the movie's grim self-consciousness becomes suffocating. There's one scene where one of Jimmy's friends, a wiry Arab kid named Nabil (Naguime Bendidi), gives Marie a ride home through nighttime Lyon. He tells her he's taking the long way just for the pleasure of the drive, and as they go he sings along with a pop song. This is easily my favorite scene in Thieves. Most of the time during this movie, you're trying to work out what Téchiné's approach means or what you're supposed to make of a character or an encounter. While Nabil is tooling around Lyon, you know what you're watching is inconsequential. It's a relief.