The Other Laurens

François Laurens is dead. If he wasn’t, then no one would seem shocked to see him walking around. Of course, with him being dead, it’s not really François but his twin, Gabriel, the other Laurens. He’s not the one who went to the South of France and became a business tycoon. He’s the failure, the one who fled to Brussels when his life fell apart. The one who rummages through trash cans and takes photos through half-closed curtains as evidence in divorce cases.

Sadly losing in translation the comedic poetry of its original title, L’autre Laurens, The Other Laurens is a slow-moving noir of shabby men and stylish women that, like its characters, mostly hides its intentions. After all, why would down-on-his-luck PI Gabriel (a memorably schlubby and disheveled Rabourdin) take on the seemingly closed case of his brother’s death? Why is his niece, Jade (Leroy), so determined to prove François’ car crash death was murder but so disinterested in involving the cops? Why does François’ widow, Shelby (Moran, Knives + Skin), hang around with bikers? And what exactly does any of this have to do with 9/11 and a missing man with a cross on his tooth?

Yet complexity and mystery aren’t enough in a film noir. There must be a certain predatory cunning, a slinking vigor that seduces the audience. Lacking that, it just becomes a shaggy dog story – and that’s the fate of The Other Laurens. It’s hard not to identify with Jade when she rolls her eyes through an overextended fable delivered by one of the bikers, as director Claude Schmitz is too enamored with that ambiguous setup. In noir terms, imagine if it took an hour for O’Hara to get on the boat in The Lady From Shanghai.

In those increasingly interminable lulls, Schmitz does find moments of intrigue. There’s an underlying tension in Gabriel’s unsettled relationship with François, a theme that Rabourdin attempts to give some well-worn life even as the surviving twin unpicks why he cares about his brother’s legacy at all. The confusion about the two gives Gabriel chances to be the man he almost was, while there’s a delicate charm to Leroy’s exploration of a woman looking for her father and maybe finding a better substitute. Yet those themes are underdeveloped and malnourished, especially since Schmitz’s preferred style of performance overemphasizes understatement. Cinematographer Florian Berutti is at least allowed some moments of visual flourish, most especially in his nighttime scenes in François’ mansion where pools of amber glow within steel blue shadows. Unfortunately, every time a character steps outside, the film starts to look and feel like a middling European late evening crime drama.

Too slight to be intriguing, too overstretched to be absorbing, too predictable to be surprising, L’autre Laurens doesn’t exactly waste its potential but does little with it. It’s been compared to the French New Wave in how each scene is underplayed, but there’s little nouvelle and far too much that is vague about it. Rabourdin, last seen as the cuckolded father and husband in incest drama Last Summer, is arguably the saving grace, as he imbues Gabriel with a certain broken charm as a man resurrecting a life he never lived. Yet as the line between François and Gabriel becomes increasingly blurred, even he gets lost in Schmitz’s narrative fogs.