By Thomas M. Puhr,
You’re best off surrendering to its mad logic.”
Like some of the neo-noirs that inspired it, Claude Schmitz’s The Other Laurens (L’autre Laurens, 2023) boasts a dizzyingly convoluted plot. I look at my frantically scribbled notes on the film, and despair washes over me. I take consolation, however, in Roger Ebert’s wise words on a certain Arthur Penn classic:“It is probably true that if you saw Night Moves several times and took careful notes, you could reconstruct exactly what happens in the movie, but that might be missing the point.” Ironically, such plot-heavy genre exercises are less concerned with narratives than they are with the people haplessly stumbling through them. If you keep this ethos in mind, then you’ll find much to enjoy in the Belgian filmmaker’s neon-drenched, gently revisionist tale: challenging character dynamics, crackling dialogue, and people looking really cool while smoking cigarettes.
Like any gumshoe worth their salt, Gabriel Laurens (Olivier Rabourdin) is a mess when we first meet him. As a private investigator whose bread and butter is snapping photographs of philandering husbands, he isn’t exactly rolling in money when his mother dies and he inherits all her debts. Though he’s clearly in no condition to help anyone, his teenaged niece, Jade (a magnetic Louise Leroy), comes knocking at his apartment door late one night asking for just that. Her father (and Gabriel’s identical twin brother), François Laurens, has recently died in a car wreck: the result of drunk driving. Or at least that’s what the authorities are saying. Jade suspects foul play, and she needs her uncle’s help cracking the case. Gabriel isn’t remotely interested (or all that broken up over either death in the family, for that matter), not even after Jade offers to pay for his services. He’ll drive her home – she hitchhiked to his apartment from Perpignan, France – but the buck stops there.
Of course, it’s not long before Gabriel is drawn – against his better judgment – into the mystery surrounding his brother’s death. (We know from these kinds of movies that a private eye doesn’t accept a case so much as it is thrust on him.) Along the way, he will encounter a rogues’ gallery of suspicious secondary characters, including: Shelby (Knife + Heart’s Kate Moran), Jade’s evil stepmother; Valéry (Marc Barbé), the leader of a Hells Angels-esque biker gang with whom François conducted business; Alberto (Vicente Gil), a Spanish crime boss; Erika (Sara Miquel), Alberto’s alluring daughter; Scott (Edwin Gaffney), a U.S. veteran looking to retire after finishing one last score; and two crooked cops (Rodolphe Burger and Francis Soetens) on the trail of a “missing gypsy” named Esteban Lopez, whose disappearance may be connected with François’ fate. Add a series of double-crossings and plot twists to this sprawling cast of characters, and you have enough material for a 6-part miniseries, let alone a 2-hour feature. The result can be overwhelming (in a moment of startlingly lazy self-awareness, one of the cops says “it’s like a bad movie”), but the central uncle-niece relationship grounds the proceedings.
Complicating matters is Schmitz’s ongoing – but only sporadically effective – cultural critiques. Consider Jade’s home, a huge estate literally dubbed “the white house.” With its gauche interior decorating choices, including a hot tub wrapped in leopard-print fabric that looks like it was stolen from the set of De Palma’s Scarface, the mansion embodies a tasteless wealth that the director clearly associates with the U.S. Less clear – and more than a little off-putting – is the filmmaker’s decision to incorporate footage of 9/11 into some scenes. Further emphasizing Schmitz’s interest in criticizing American geopolitical dominance is the Scott character, whose monologues about his time in the military grow tiresome. It’s certainly interesting – even a little subversive, considering how prototypically American the genre is – to see such commentary spliced into a neo-noir, but the director doesn’t quite pull off the balancing act. At times, it feels like we’re watching him pound a square peg into a round hole.
As written by Schmitz and Kostia Testut, the script is a bit more successful in its efforts to simultaneously celebrate and critique its chosen genre. Some of the dialogue would be right at home in a Robert Siodmak movie. When Shelby first meets a disheveled, down-on-his-luck Gabriel, she is struck by his resemblance to her stylish, ostentatiously rich husband: “It’s like seeing him all over again, but…out of focus.” Other exchanges are decidedly contemporary, as when Jade reams her uncle out after he accuses her of dressing like a “whore.” If the writers seem committed to calling out earlier films for sidelining their female characters, then it’s ironic when they ultimately do the same to some of theirs: Erika, for example, is introduced and earns our sympathy (she sleeps with Gabriel, thinking he’s François; I told you things get messy), only to disappear from the narrative entirely.
Any film that subscribes to a more-is-more mentality (more characters, more twists, more social commentary, etc.) is almost doomed to buckle under the weight of its own ambitions. Criticizing it for biting off more than it can chew feels like admonishing a Vegas floor show for being too gaudy. So if you decide to buy a ticket, you’re best off surrendering to its mad logic.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.