Director: Claude Schmitz
Writers: Claude Schmitz, Kostia Testut
Stars: Olivier Rabourdin, Louise Leroy, Kate Moran
Synopsis: A private detective forced to face the ghosts of his past when his niece asks him to investigate her father’s death.
“If he wasn’t dead, I’d be filing for divorce.” So says Shelby (Kate Moran) with a scoff as she tells Gabriel Laurens (Olivier Rabourdin) about the shady behavior her late husband – and Gabriel’s identical twin – François (also Rabourdin) exhibited in the lead-up to his death. As we learned earlier in Claude Schmitz’s The Other Laurens, François was killed in a car wreck, although his daughter Jade (Louise Leroy, making her big-screen debut in style) isn’t so sure that’s the full story. It helps that her uncle Gabriel, despite having become estranged from his brother years ago, is a private investigator. Fueled by conviction and confusion, Jade seeks Gabriel’s help; thankfully for The Other Laurens, her hunch has some weight to it, and it might just start with her mother. “If he wasn’t dead, I’d be filing for divorce.” Say, isn’t it a bit easier to tidy up a rich man’s assets when he’s in the ground as opposed to seated in a defendant’s seat?
As serious as this all sounds, Schmitz’s longest feature to date – his other films, including 2018’s excellent Carwash, barely scratch the 80-minute mark – is delivered in a vein more akin to the work of the Coens, and not just due to its crime backdrop, a plot device their films tend to prioritize. The Other Laurens certainly contains a good mystery, but it’s special due toits dry, deadpan humor, its grainy, 70s-style vibe (thanks in large part to Florian Berutti’s cinematography and Thomas Turine’s pulsating score), and its ensemble, a troupe of actors that enjoy varying amounts of screen time yet all make meals out of their performances. Such is especially the case for Rabourdin and Leroy, the unlikely duo that Schmitz tracks throughout the film as they search for the truth behind Jade’s father’s death.
That truth is far from easily-uncovered, as it involves deceit after deceit, drug deals gone awry, and one particularly menacing motorcycle gang that, given what they get up to behind closed doors, makes The Bikeriders’ Vandals look like the Teletubbies. No matter the opposition, Gabriel seems a capable opponent, a chameleonic figure who spends much of the film unwillingly morphing into the brother he left behind so long ago. It’s not that the life François led was unenticing; he was a real estate tycoon whose French chateau would make for a killer one-episode locale in a prestige HBO drama. But his brother’s old orbit is something Gabriel intentionally fled after his own life unraveled, and returning to it caused him to endure a black hole-esque pull into a dark world that he never meant to take part in.
Of course, this is precisely what Schmitz hopes for the audience to latch onto, a blending between the two brothers that lends itself to an increasingly-captivating narrative thread surrounding identity crises and complex familial dynamics, a series of psychological battles that cause Gabriel to agonize over his past more than he already has. That Jade sees directly through him makes for something all the more compelling: An intermittent battle of wits between youth and experience. The author Robert Fulgham once wrote, “Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” Jade certainly listens, but her gaze is her real superpower.
The Other Laurens is far more successful as a two-hander, a relationship-centric mystery involving Gabriel and Jade than it is a massive caper with an endlessly plotty scheme and an even bigger cast. That’s helped along by the fact that Rabourdin and Leroy play well together, a duo that screams juxtaposition in their respective appearances and mental makeups. Rabourdin is captivatingly stoic and massive, qualities he evidently has as a performer but wasn’t necessarily able to access as a supporting player in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, also from this year. That Rabourdin, playing a private eye, is opposite Leroy, who inhabits a spry teen that seems to court danger wherever she goes, certainly aids matters.
Yet it stands to reason that Schmitz might be just as capable of spinning this film’s web no matter who he was working with. The Other Laurens is a film that prioritizes its whirlwind of a premise to a fault at times, but commits to selling it nonetheless. By the time it touches down at its perhaps-inevitable conclusion, the fact that we’ve arrived at our predetermined destination matters far more than the turbulence that was prominent along the way. Bumps in the road are called bumps for a reason, after all; if we saw them as roadblocks, we’d spend all of our time going in circles. The Other Laurens occasionally flirts with that dangerous fate, but that it lands the plane in the end is enough of a gift to walk away appreciating the ride.
