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Genealogies Of A Crime

1997, Movie, NR, 113 mins

Genealogies Of A Crime: Review

GENEALOGIES OF A CRIME | GENEALOGIES D'UN CRIME
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Another entry in the encyclopedia of obscure, tedious ideas. Raul Ruiz's latest mind-bending intellectual "thriller" is second-hand Borges, all structure and sign but no play: He takes the sort of story from which Luis Bunuel could have made a masterpiece and instead forges an instrument of torment. Attorney Solange (Catherine Deneuve), who loses every case, is appointed to defend Rene (Melvil Poupaud), charged with killing his aunt Jeanne (also Deneuve). Nothing about the case is straightforward: Jeanne, a psychoanalyst who believed a person's destiny is determined by age 5, raised Rene -- by all accounts a petit monstre -- but also studied him, and there's a heck of a lot of literary and psychoanalytic theory flying around, the kind that gives contemporary French philosophy a heavy reputation for tiresome and inconsequential dithering. While there's clearly something being said about the structure of human experience, free will vs. determinism and the so-called French notion of fatalité, you have to claw your way through many dull and baffling scenes that hint at the partisan positions of various psychoanalytic societies. Ruiz is a director of immense intelligence; like his idol, novelist Jorge Luis Borges, he aims for an encyclopedic knowledge of films, books and people. But that intelligence doesn't translate into an entertaining, edifying or thought-provoking movie. Ruiz reworks the devices evident in the enthralling THREE LIVES AND ONLY ONE DEATH -- dream states, the fairy-tale elements, repetition of events and an exploration of the notion of story vs. theory -- but while the film's oh-so-French characters appear rapt, it's all less than engrossing. Score one for the rubbish heap of a most worthy director. leave a comment --Sandra Contreras
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