The Other Laurens tells the story of twin brothers-there's the successful François Laurens, who seems to have it all. He's got the enormous wealth. The beautiful wife. The doting daughter. And then there's Gabriel Laurens, who has to pretend his credit card is on the fritz so his niece can fill up his gas tank for him. Too bad François is the one who winds up murdered. Or was he? And was all his success we believed it to be?
Gabriel (Olivier Rabourdin), in true film noir fashion, is a down-on-his-luck private investigator with barely a dollar to his name. His brother's death seems like a clear case of a drunk driving accident, but his niece Jade (Louise Leroy ) isn't convinced. Her father didn't drink. None of this adds up. She enlists Gabriel's services to find out what really happened. As Gabriel opens up the proverbial Pandora's box, he finds himself confronting himself and his own past.
The plot itself is secondary to individual scenes. I know the film has an intentional style and vibe that harkens back to 1970s Neo Noirs like Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Arthur Penn's Night Moves, but the near-total dismissal of coherence of the plot, in favor of allowing noir-inspired shenanigans to run amok, reminds me of the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski. Even the title of it-here, referring to the OTHER brother, or in Lebowski's case, the "big" one, the one with the money.
The problem is that I don't believe that The Other Laurens is a strong enough movie in its individual scenes, or on overall vibe, to get away with eschewing a coherent plot. Far too often, the movie is boring. Director Claude Schmitz has a lot to say and instead of saying one thing elegantly, he allows his film to say all the things he wants, with little to no regard for how it will all unfold. The simple thrill in these kinds of movies is seeing the mystery unfold. We see the main character connect the dots. We get from point A to point B in surprising, unexpected ways. Up until the point Gabriel comes to understand the film's big reveal, we've never been given any indication he's good at his job. How everything snaps together feels rushed at best, and totally contrived at worst.
Worse yet, The Other Laurens dedicates a decent amount of screen time to shoe-horning in a personal connection Gabriel has to the events that unfolded on 9/11. This narrative decision is so unbelievably bad and ill-conceived that I couldn't decide if Schmitz was making some sort of edgelord joke about the tragedy of that day or if it was a completely tone-deaf attempt at pathos. It reminded me of Phoebe Cates's tragic monologue in Gremlins that toes the line between pitch-black humor and full-on tragedy. But whereas that monologue involved a dead Santa Claus, this involves showing actual footage of human beings meeting a tragic end. It is so mind-bogglingly bad that it colors the rest of the film. It occurs at just about the halfway point, too, and afterward, nothing is the same.
The first half of the film succeeds in piquing our interest in what's about to happen and how this mystery will be unfurled before us. The second half, after the bizarre 9/11 reference, is a complete undoing of what the first half had set up before it. It felt like someone set up an intricate series of dominos to be knocked down, one by one, to create an incredible image, only to have someone else drunkenly stumble through the network of dominos, leaving some still standing, some thrown clear across the room. In the second half, whole plots are abandoned with payoffs occurring off-screen as a sort of too-cool-for-school to the conventions of storytelling.
The Other Laurens is one of the more frustrating films I've seen in a long time. I admire an ambitious failure, but the failure here is due to a lack of ambition.
