Word: voleur
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JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO may be the only actor in the world who could look suave, imperturbable and sexy straight through Armageddon. Louis Malle, using Belmondo's steeliness for its full impact, gives us ten long minutes of his cool gaze at the opening of Le Voleur. (This is an apparently neglected film that resurfaced this summer at the Telluride Film Festival.) In the dark, eerie moonlight we watch the burglar, Belmondo, crowbar his way into a ritzy, turn-of-the-century mansion. You have never seen such gaudy art nouveau furniture as lies within this house. And Belmondo sees...
...system. It may not show on his depressed face, but he needs the rush. How in the world Malle conceived the idea to weigh down such a juicy theme and such dashing actors with such a heavy moral remains unclear. But there it is. Le Voleur plays like the flip side to Malle's Lacombe, Lucien. Lacombe made us deal with a young man's value-free drift into collaboration with the Nazis--it showed us the aimless, human side of sellout. Le Voleur confronts us with a less interesting but equally unrelenting appraisal of a high-class thief...
...when the Crocodile saw he couldn't win a race, he often stopped trying. "If the owner wants me to place, I try, but I don't like to ride a horse into the ground for nothing." English fans nicknamed him "brigand"; in France, he is called voleur (thief) more often than le roi des jockeys...
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