Finally, a version of Reservoir Dogs for The New Yorker set. It’s in some elite part of France that director Ra’up McGee’s mobsters—all members of the same inner circle—play musical chairs with each other, shuffling for a mysterious silver suitcase with a key inside. What does it open? More importantly, who cares? McGee needlessly scoops out and discards whole chunks of important detail under the misguided assumption that wholesale obfuscation—the identity of his characters, how they’re connected, and what they’re after—has a complicating effect. A simple story is made to appear obtuse by removing all traces of emotion and backstory, save for a series of silly childhood flashbacks meant to explain why Laurent Lucas and Irène Jacob’s characters chose to pursue lives of crime. But it’s obvious that McGree is trying to force his audience to read something with the depth of a children’s book through a clinically blind person’s eyeglasses. Only a fool would prefer this banal chess game to the fearless moral and political shadings of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows. McGee’s sexless, slowly paced, and insufficiently dramatized film is also shamed by the pure ether of Claire Denis’s The Intruder, which rewards our intelligence by doing the complete opposite: keeping all the unimportant stuff off-screen.
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