Word: vercel
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Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as a mild-mannered real estate agent called Vercel. When his wife's lover is murdered, he is called in to be interrogated. He returns from the police station, to find his wife sprawled on the living room floor; one neat bullet shot through her head. Vercel decides to ignore the advice of his lawyer--"The French adore love affairs...understand crimes of passion...I'll have you acquitted"--and starts out to find the killer himself. Accompanied by a secretary he had just fired, he decides to leave for Marseilles, hoping to dig up clues...
...scene, the secretary (Fanny Ardant) has just found a mysterious scrap of paper in a wastebasket of a hotel room Mme. Vercel once stayed in. Wandering out into a strange neighborhood, she walks a few blocks, then happens to climb a high wooden fence, behind which an announcer for a horse race happens, just at that moment, to call out the cryptic words that--surprise--happened to be scribbled on the note. This happens again and again; the movie, in fact, stops just short of producing the name of the murderer as a cerealbox prize. Consequently, Vercel and company...
Unfortunately, the self-satire becomes very tiresome. Self-conscious but not detached, Confidentially Yours neither works as frank satire, nor does it hold the suspense of a thriller. The bizarre jumbled reality of Vercel's world has more in common with that of a Thomas Pynchon novel than with the finely-crafted artifice of the classic film noir. Pynchon, however, has wit. Sustaining little of the illusion that is vital in, for example, Scarlet Street, Confidentially Yours makes no bones of having ketchup for blood and a pacemaker for a heart. The movie actually seems to be the director...
While Ardant manages to be as engaging as her role allows, Trintignant is bland even beyond the dictates of his character. As Vercel, he comes across as unequivocally wimpy rather than charmingly understated, leaving the romantic subplot quite unconvincing--mildly grotesque, in fact, as the love scenes inevitably resemble unmotivated assaults...
...John V. Vercel, a Cambridge resident who was looking for an office-type job through the matching service yesterday, said that at least some local businesses "are a little more conducive to hiring people looking for work...