SWINDLE, THE (RIEN NE VA PLUS)(director/writer: Claude Chabrol; cinematographer: Eduardo Serra; editor: Monique Fardoulis; cast: Isabelle Huppert (Betty), Michel Serrault (Victor), Francois Cluzet (Maurice), Jean-Francois Balmer (Monsieur K), Jackie Berroyer (Chatillon), 1997-France)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
This is one of Chabrol's poorer films, the fiftieth one for the 68-year-old French director. It has the look and script of a B-film (even though it was written expressly for the two stars). Chabrol is playful here, but his lifetime of running gags against the bourgeoisie and his attempt to make this a giddy film, just didn't hold up. Though, there are some delightfully coy moments, as a pair of small time scam artists, the wily, 70ish Victor (Michel Serrault) and the 40ish, sex pot, Betty (Isabelle Huppert), work their nonviolent schemes in a casino and at a dentist's convention. Their relationship is one of longtime friends, business partners, and possibly, at one time, they were lovers. But it was never clearly spelled out what their intimate relationship was, as Chabrol likes to keep one guessing. Betty, even sardonically, calls Victor daddy throughout much of the film. It wouldn't surprise me if they were related that way. The heart of the film, even more than their con games, becomes this precarious relationship between the older man and much younger woman, as it becomes anyone's guess what their real relation is and how they really feel about each other, and whether they are capable of swindling each other.
Betty picks up a fellow gambler at the casino's baccarat table and takes him to a bar, where she tells him she is a director of an insurance company and then slips a sleep inducing narcotic into his drink and takes the romantically inclined lawn mower businessman back to his room in the hotel. Undressed in her black slip, she seductively waits for him to conk out and for her partner Victor to come in and go through his belongings, cleverly stealing a small percentage of money in the rich man's wallet and forging his signature on a check, while leaving his credit cards untouched, so that when he awakes he won't even realize that he's been robbed.
They next head separately for a Swiss resort Sils Maria (where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra), near St. Moritz, to work one of their schemes on a dentists' convention. But when he arrives a bit later, using the pseudonym Colonel Emmanuel Victor, retired, a role which he plays with proper panache, and with Betty, now impersonating a Russian blonde named Sissi, who has swooped down onto a dashing young businessman courier, Maurice (Francois Cluzet). This relationship makes Victor jealous. But she tells him that he's their pigeon, he is carrying 5 million in Swiss francs in his attache case and is up to cheating his firm out of it. Victor is upset that she has switched the original plan he had for working a scam on the dentists, thinking this one is too big for them and too dangerous.
Maurice is scheduled to bring the money to Guadeloupe to be exchanged, and Chabrol adroitly uses all his many years of filmmaking skills to show double-crosses and switches of bags, and how things can go violently wrong with even the best of schemes. But, it is mostly a story about the two characters, their needs and how they relate to each other. Each character becoming unpredictable to the other one. That forms most of the wry comedy. There is also interest as to how and if the swindle can be pulled off by the couple, who, at times, have not told the other what they are up to.
This caper story seemed stale to me, even though it has a certain amount of charm. But it did not splash across the screen with verve and audacity as much as Chabrol intended it to. The director seemed to try too hard to relive his past with many allusions to characters and inside jokes from his many films, with the old master pulling out his tricks of the trade from a hat with too much ease to be believable.
REVIEWED ON 3/27/2000 GRADE: C-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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