'Thieves' doesn't get away with it

By Kellen Hertz

One of the posters advertising Thieves promises a highly attractive cinematic experience: on the right is the immortal face of Catherine Deneuve, actress, icon, beauty. Deneuve's work with directors Luis Bunuel and Francois Truffaut (to name a couple) had made her internationally famous for the past thirty-five years. Opposite Deneuve is Daniel Auteuil's

Catherine Deneuve caresses Laurence Cote in Les Voleurs at York Square.

craggy face. For those of you not up on French film stars, Auteuil is the French version of Daniel Day-Lewis, a chameleon who's played everything from the lovesick hunchback Ugolin in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring to a frigid violin repairman in Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter).

Between these two actors' monumental mugs lounges the lithe figure of Laurence Cote, who plays Juliette, the enigmatic, bisexual, novice criminal with whom Deneuve's Marie (a philosophy professor) and Auteuil's Alex (a cop) both desire. Cote basically looks like the title character in La Femme Nikita - sunglasses, short dress, vacant, dangerous expression. She promises us a little sex, some action, and plenty of cinematic excitement.

The movie itself doesn't quite live up to its publicity. Thieves is reminiscent of Nikita--the dark lighting, the lure of the female protagonist, a plot centering around sex and violence. But all the atmospheric legwork that writer/director Andre Techine does to announce that his film is a taut, sexy psychological study diffuses in a plot overwhelmed with too many characters and plot lines to give any one particular meaning. Instead of centering on the destructive love triangle between the central characters, Techine ruminates on the meaning of his own title. Crime, love, and what gets stolen during both could have been very engrossing had Techine chosen to involve the Deneuve and Auteuil characters a little. But the plot's principal event does not involve Marie or Alex, who instead spend the bulk of the film politely discussing their mutual obsession with Juliette. A potentially passionate examination of the strategems of love becomes talky and boring.

Auteuil is good as a tough flic, but Deneuve is given little to do besides sound sultry and bathe with her lover. The newcomer Cote makes an excellent, tortured Juliette, but the film ultimately can't decide what it's about: the relationship between Marie and Alex, between both of them and Juliette, or between Alex and the entirely superfluous character of his young nephew, Justin, whose voice-overs pepper the movie like distracting rip-offs of My Life as a Dog, and other young-boy-coming-of-age-and-discovering-death flicks.

If the film had embodied the poster, Thieves would have been about two charismatic, passionate people fighting over a fascinating, manipulative girl. Instead, the conflict gets lost in a story that tries to be complex and ends up confusing, undermining itself and any ultimate meaning.

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