THE OTHER LAURENS (Claude Schmitz 2023)

[Chris Knipp]

LOUISE LEROY, OLIVIER RABOURDIN IN THE OTHER LAURENS

CLAUDE SCHMITZ: THE OTHER LAURENS/L'AUTRE LAURENS (2023)

Offbeat Mediterranean noir

This neo noir from Belgian director Claude Schmitz evokes American movies while remaining thoroughly European. It premiered at Cannes Directors' Fortnight and garnered respectful reviews in Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, and The Film Verdict. It has the elegant air of something like Roger Vadim's 1957 No Sun in Venice, absolutely not a good movie, but one with a supremely suave jazz score by the MJQ, one of the great ones, and a memorably moody setting. The Other Laurens has a Shakespearean opening sequence you won't make any sense of till the end - best to rewatch the first fifteen or twenty minutes. It starts out in Spanish, then goes to English, then French. The film is Belgian, and the protagonist, Gabriel Laurens (the reliable and appealing Olivier Rabourdin), the requisite shabby loser private investigator, who, like J.J. 'Jake' Gittes, spies on adulterous husbands. He lives in Brussels, where he has been seeing his dying mother. But most of the action takes place in Perpignan, near Andorra, practically in Spain.

Here, François Laurens (also Olivier Rabourdin), Gabriel's twin brother, their mother's favorite, bought and tastelessly decorated an immense mansion, which, his sleazy wife Shelby (Kate Moran) says, "made him laugh." But François laughs no more, for he is dead. Or is he? Or is there a François? Maybe he's just Gabriel's notional doppelgänger, a more successful other self - or maybe not that either, rather a more spectacular failure. (The two brothers have been estranged for some time.) François has a moody blonde teenage daughter, Jade (Louise Leroy), Gabriel's niece, who abruptly turns up in Brussels at Gabriel's door, wanting him to investigate the recent incineration in a car of her father in Perpignan, which she doesn't think was an accident. This is the premise of The Other Laurens.

The film takes place in a glamorous Mediterranean world with an international cast and the work of cinematographer Florian Berruti is beautiful to look at, its bright sunny tackiness not unlike Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and other bright colored seventies Hollywood departures from noir's original black and white. This film also suggests The Two Jakes (with its hint of a doppelgänger) or its more illustrious predecessor Chinatown, and other "existential" seventies neo noirs like Arthur Penn’s Night Moves. Maybe we should just consider there to be a special Eurotrash mode of noir with rich and pretty people in elegant European settings. No Sun in Venice however has almost no discernible plot, whereas Schmitz's film has plenty, though it may get a bit fuzzy toward the end, and, at nearly two hours it runs a bit too long (as others also feel).

There has indeed been some foul play, even more devious than young Jade has imagined. What François and his wife Shelby have been involved in is not on the up-and-up, nor truly cooperative. There are some Spanish petty gangsters who have been brought in. There is a bumbling two-man team of local police detectives, always a little pleasingly out of sync. (They account for much of what Neil Young in Screen Daily calls this film's "dollops of deadpan humour in the Coens' vein".) There is also a French-speaking motorcycle gang, which follows Jade wherever she goes, like badly groomed extras from a Jean Cocteau film. The Spaniards and the wheelmen create an edge, and a slightly weird confusion.

Rabourdin provides a mildly grumpy, rumpled charm that is essential, because this kind of movie is all about its appealing loser of a private dick, about mood, and about a confusing plotline that will jell only at the end. I just checked and Chinatown is over two hours, so we can't say The Other Laurens is too long by the standard of neo noir: it just didn't have a master screenwriter like Robert Towne. As mentioned, it does have humor ("dark comedy and weirdness," Jay Weissberg calls it in his Film Verdict review; he considers that Belgian), and a mystery to solve.

An original note is struck by having two Americans, Shelby and her newly arrived black brother Scott (Edwin Gaffney), who speak only English. Scott (who encounters racism from the redneck motorcycle gang, who call him an "amerloque") has a dinnertime monologue about being sent to Afghanistan as a Marine and trained to be a killer. This time Scott has to fly a helicopter, and it goes strangely. Here, unlike the seventies noirs, there is a spate of modern (or Western style) violence, where lots of guns and a couple of knives come out and are used, which Scott, despite his alleged trained killer status, finds traumatizing.

As can happen with overstuffed plots, things get a bit rushed at the end, but the doppelgänger idea comes into play just long enough to pleasurably tease the mind. The Other Laurens is a film whose parts are more than its whole. Why 9/11 is shoehorned in is hard to say. The "1970s vibe," as Jordan Mintzer calls it in his Hollywood Reporter review, is the best thing about the film, of which the visually handsome French-Belgian-Spanish overlay provided by the cast, crew, and settings is a pleasing additional aspect. Cool vibe and pretty cinematography aren't quite enough to make this a noir to remember, but Claude Schmidt obviously has a knack for genre and for wrangling complicated casts. He remains one to watch.

The Other Laurens/L'Autre Laurens, 117 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight May 2023. Limited release in France Jun. 7, 2023. It got a terrible AlloCiné press rating of 2.9 (59%), but an admiring review in Cahiers du Cinéma ("Schmitz doesn't cut corners, he doesn't shy away from cacophony") and NouvelObs called the film "very promising": "Very promising, the story would have required a little more mastery, a little less delirium: we await with curiosity the next film from a talented filmmaker." Released in the US at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas Aug. 23, 2024, with VOD release on Aug. 27.