Thieves
With Catherine Deneuve, Daniel Auteuil, Laurence Cote, Fabienne Babe, Julien Riviere, Benoit Magimel, Didier Bezace, and Ivan Desny.
When was the last time you saw a movie that was truly for as well as about grown-ups? Whatever the virtues of Breaking the Waves, a mature point of view certainly isn’t one of them. The English Patient is at most a feature for dreamy young adults (especially those who consider it romantic for a character to become a Nazi in order to spend time with a former lover’s dead body), and even the good points of The Crucible and Ghosts of Mississippi don’t include the sort of insights that ought to come with age. Mars Attacks!, which grows in stature and audacity the more I think about it, is cannily likened by critic David Ehrenstein to the work of Alfred Jarry–making Nicholson’s fatuous president a version of Pere Ubu–but the merits of Jarry aren’t exactly those of adults. Even the adept romantic comedy One Fine Day, which has a lot to say about the perils and complications of being a single parent, intermittently takes leave of its grown-up concerns and traffics in the contrivances and coincidences of its elected Hollywood genre.
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Born in 1943 in Valence d’Agen, Techine wrote criticism for Cahiers du Cinema for four years in the mid-60s, including the period when Jacques Rivette was its editor. Techine went on to become an assistant to Rivette on L’amour fou before directing his first feature in 1969. His early features–Paulina s’en va (1969), French Provincial (1974), Barocco (1976), and The Bronte Sisters (1978)–are basically the work of an intelligent if not especially original cinephile. But he asserts that starting with Hotel des Ameriques (1981), the first of his films with Catherine Deneuve, there is a change–which I have to take on faith, because I haven’t seen any of his 80s films. (“From Hotel des Ameriques onward my films are no longer genre films,” he said a few years ago. “My inspiration is no longer drawn from the cinema.”) Certainly by the time he made My Favorite Season (1993) and Wild Reeds (1994) his focus was clearly and squarely on life, and his sense of film rhythm was derived most of all from what his actors were doing, even if the cinematic intelligence that shaped his early work had been not so much discarded as reconfigured.
The novel begins and ends with Benjy’s innocent reading of troubled family events, and Thieves begins and ends with Justin. After we hear a cacophony of offscreen voices behind the credits–the voices of the various characters drifting together and apart like lines in a fugue–we begin with Justin’s discovery of the death of his father Ivan, whose body has been brought home and placed in the living room, and wind up meeting all the major characters except Marie as Justin encounters them over the course of a day. After this prologue, we switch to Alex in Lyons a year before Ivan’s death, when he first meets Juliette, who’s brought to his office for shoplifting, and we follow his story–which also involves Ivan, Jimmy, and Marie–until we arrive again at the day after Ivan’s death and at the same family home, only now the viewpoint is Alex’s. (The repetition of the action extends to such details as a plane flying overhead, and the mountains and heavy snowfall, along with certain family details, call to mind Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.)
Deneuve, who’s developed since her first major roles in the 60s (including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Repulsion, Belle de jour, Mississippi Mermaid, and Tristana) from a glamorous star to a remarkably subtle actress, here plays a character who suggests in many respects Techine’s former mentor, the late Roland Barthes, a wistfully melancholic academic who wrote about many of Techine’s films and who appeared briefly as William Makepeace Thackeray in The Bronte Sisters. (Barthes’ book Fragments: A Lover’s Discourse often seems echoed in Marie’s rueful and amorous reflections about her former student, whose tape-recorded autobiographical musings form the basis of a book Marie writes. Even the title of a previous book she wrote, Traces, has a Barthesian ring.)
