Traceless (Sans Laisser de Traces) (6/10)

January 23rd, 2012

The last thing you need three weeks before you’re due to be named as the president of a large French corporation, I would suggest, is to get pangs of regret over the way you got to be in this lofty position. No, I take that back. The regret would be the second-worst thing. The worst by far would be to act on your conscience and try to rectify your old mistake, because when you do things like that people end up getting killed. Then where would you be? In deep doo-doo.

Étienne Meunier (Benoît Magimel, one of this site’s favourites) is the exec in question, living high on the hog with a beautiful apartment and equally beautiful wife – daughter of the boss, no less – in domestic bliss. Why, things are going so well for him that he even bumps into an old schoolmate named Patrick (François-Xavier Demaison), a schlub of a man who admittedly hasn’t weathered quite as well as the suave businessman, and the pair enjoy a relaxing drink as they reminisce about old times. Something’s been bothering Étienne, though, something he needs to get off his chest. It’s about his meteoric rise to fame.

He stole another man’s idea, an unpatented spot-remover that made his company millions, and it’s bugged him ever since. He has never told the man about this, despite calling him several times and hanging up. ‘Tell him!’ suggests Patrick, ‘Get him to forgive you. What’s the worst that could happen?’ Well, the guy might take it swell or...he might get arsey, threaten blackmail, and end up dead.

Now there’s a problem. The schlub was there and he wants paying off, the cops have prints and they need to be negotiated, and to cap it all Étienne’s rich lifestyle is under threat thanks to another potential applicant for the president’s job. A week ago all looked rosy for the debonair, insistent Frenchman. Now, not so much.

Decent, without being spectacularly so, Traceless leans towards the spiralling doom side of noir. A man starts the movie with everything and, as the movie progresses, events and forces conspire to rob him of them. Where Traceless differs, though, is in the decision-making of director Grégoire Vigneron, who co-wrote with Laurent Tirard, and the kinks he’s inserted. Some situations are obvious and predictable, but importantly not all of them are. There are enough to recognise them as tips of the hat to other movies of the same ilk, particularly those so much-loved in the early 1950s, but with enough originality to set it apart from them, too. There is a young, nubile teen – there are always young, nubile teens – the daughter of the dead man, and her charms are alluring. Neither she, nor the relationship between her and the businessman, turn out quite as expected.

My draconian, all-new rating system for 2012 incorporates the deduction of marks for certain things. I’ve had to take two points away here for a pair of breaches: one, we have the classic ‘anxious man leaning against the shower wall’ scene, and two, we get one of those dream sequences that we don’t realise are dreams until the guy wakes up all sweaty. The fact that Traceless has those sorts of scenes in it should be enough to indicate that this isn’t top drawer filmmaking, but the story is interesting enough to hold the attention, and there’s always a certain guilty pleasure in seeing a fat cat fall. Thrillers without guns are out of fashion in the current scheme of things, so any new one is more than welcome.