Right after Ma saison preferee and Wild Reeds is Les voleurs, and it’s part of that great run Techine had in the mid-90s. There are so many things that are engaging in this film. While this is a crime movie….and you gotta love the way the French do them….it’s mostly another humanistic view of personalities and relationships. Marie and Alex love Juliette, and when Juliette vanishes from the movie midway through, they’re left to cope with their loss. It’s another example of the Techine plot structure where we get to like an important character and then lose the character half way through the film. I think of Temoins as the archetype of that style in Techine.
This verson is a little different from that in Temoins, though, because the shifting perspectives of the story give us, temporally, different focuses. We don’t see a group of people move forward in time here. In Voleurs, the first part of the film shows us Alex, his brother and his family. We get more on Alex as Juliette enters the story and we learn about that relationship; we start to settle into a story about the jaded, aloof detective. The story then takes an unexpected turn when we meet Catherine Deneuve’s Marie half-way through and Marie becomes a major character as we lose track of Juliette. I like this irregular plot structure that won’t fit the intro-rising action-climax-denouement story we’re so used to. It's fresh, and it works.
Like in Saison preferee, the relationship of Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil becomes the central focus of the film, and Deneuve, if anything, is better here than in Saison. She has great range this film, and she tempers every emotional swing into the creation of the academic Marie, who is cracking under the stress of losing her unexpected, intense love of Juliette. Likewise, Saison and Voleurs have put Auteuil on my map as an actor. His is a consistent, underplayed, inscrutable character who, like Marie, has a hard shell that is penetrated by Juliette. We see
more of Alex than Marie in the film, so we understand that his emotional repression comes from his family history and his job, and we get his interior as we watch his frank sexual relationship with Juliette. And we come to see that he’s lying to us (and to himself) about it. Soon after Juliette left the film, I was caught a little off-guard when Alex began to take an interest in Marie, but that interest makes sense now after my having seen the whole film. Alex feels; he has heart. I missed that because I’m so used to buying into the surface I see in a film that I don’t question enough. Alex’s inviting Marie to dinner – and seeing the pains he’s gone to in order to dress it up – would have surprised Marie as much as it did me. Richly realistic character that she is, Marie blows the evening because she has her own issues to deal with and doesn’t really care about or look into Alex much either. That dinner is a seminal moment in the film to me.And there is the character range and richness here I like so much in Techine. We see the family in detail, and all that info makes us care about them even though they are outside the main flow of the film. The same is true of the surplus we get around Juliette with her brother and their friends. And I enjoyed the opening and closing focus on the little boy. The story here reminded me slightly of As I Lay Dying, with the perspective of the film shifting among characters; AILD shifts into unusual points of view like Jewel’s and even the dog’s, while here we get the perspective of an angry, repressed child, trying to cope with the loss of a parent; he may become an Alex. And there's a little French play with Barthesian suspense as this kid hides a gun early in the movie…..but never returns to or uses it.
This is a deep, warm, thoughtful movie and deserves more attention than it gets.
