Les Voleurs (Thieves) Directed by Andre Techine, written by Andre Techine and Gilles Taurand, starring Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Laurence Cote, Benoit Magimel, Fabienne Babe, Didier Bezace, Julien Riviere, Ivan Desny.
Trap: Before we get down to discussing this film can I ask you, does Catherine Deneuve have a picture of herself in her attic or what?
Bluesy: I think so. It's funny, in the film they seemed to be trying for an older, mature, less taut looking Deneuve, and she still managed to carried herself with such class. Though I will say, at the press screening, she looked 10 years younger than she did in the film and incredibly polished. Maybe they used aging make-up to give her more character. I'd like to see a movie with her and Sophia Loren in it. Call it the "First Woman's Club", where her and Sophia steal the men from innocent 20 and 30 something's just by giving an intense gaze and adjusting their pantyhose.
Trap: I could see that. Which is why it's a pity that while this film doesn't exactly squander her - she is just as radiant as when she appeared in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg back when she was seventeen - but it hardly shows her to her best advantage. I really wish I liked this film a lot more than I did - it starts off with a good idea, and although it's well-acted and a number of individual scenes are quite affecting, I don't think it ultimately added up to much.
Techine has always been a somewhat self-conscious director; his early films in particular are loaded with quotes and references to other films, and in this case he seems to be trying for a peculiar cross between a crime film and a family melodrama weaving a complicated story about a group of people who find themselves drawn together by the mysterious death of Ivan (Didier Bezace), a small-time gangster: his young son, his brother Alex (Daniel Auteuil), who is also a police detective and his bitter rival, a young woman, Juliette (Laurence Cote), who works for him and becomes his brother's lover, while also carrying on an intense affair with her philosophy professor (Deneuve), who Alex also finds himself falling for. Techine structures this material as a series of intricately-interwoven flashbacks and flashforwards, each from the point of view of a different character, so that we only gradually realize what the circumstances that led up to Ivan's death actually were. Unfortunately, for me at any rate, the mystery is solved fairly early in the film, and it then spends so long chasing off in so many directions that any impact it might have had is lost.
Bluesy: That's funny, I didn't even know it was supposed to be a mystery. I'm not quite sure what genre it was really trying to hit, but what I walked away with was some interesting character studies of cold people that left me... cold.
Unlike another of Auteuil's portrayal's of a man incapable of love or feeling in Un Cour En Hiver, I thought Alex wasn't really interesting enough of a character to spend an entire film with. Actually, the scenario of him playing a cop from a family of thieves sounded good on the onset, but everyone is so unsympathetic and dispassionate, and since there is no one narrator to even side with, as the job of the voice-over is handed off from fragment to fragment... I had a hard time really liking this film that much. I didn't hate it, and the ideas it set forth of unrequited love and of everyone gravitating toward the character of Juliette for some reason or another was interesting enough... but Juliette HERSELF wasn't really all that interesting. I never figured out why any of these people, including Denueve, who is the only sensitive, vulnerable feeling character in the film was really all that interested in Juliette to start with.
Trap: That's what I mean. The film tries to do so many things at once that none of them individually ever manages to make much of an impression. I liked the layering effect of adding each character's voice one at a time, to build up the sense of a bigger story that each one is only privy to a small fragment of, so in the end I felt really let down that the story seemed so diffuse and meandering. Perhaps he was trying to suggest an even larger world beyond the immediate incidents he was depicting, but I just saw a lot of loose ends that were never properly tied up.
Bluesy: Sort of like a bizarre pasta dish that looks interesting on the menu, combining carrots, tomatoes, zucchini and assorted herbs... but ultimately way too little garlic and not enough, if any meat.
Trap: But at least I didn't end up with indigestion.
Bluesy and Trap Rate-a-Flick:
Les Voleurs:
Bland 
DisappointingI WANT MORE REVIEWS
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