Genealogies of a Crime

You could take this nutty fantasy of murder and identity-swapping—starring Melvil Poupaud as a man accused of killing his aunt, Catherine Deneuve both as the victim of the crime and the murderer’s defense lawyer, and Michel Piccoli as the leader of a fringe psychoanalytic society—for a kind of index of Ruiz’s obsessions as a filmmaker. Characters bleed into each other; odd rituals are enacted; chronologies splinter and dissolve. Piccoli’s character, doomed by a rare disorder to forget whomever he meets, uses photographs as memory surrogates. For one of his rivals, on the other hand, the most severe human dependency isn’t on images but on plots. “Men think that they live stories,” he says in a moment suggestive of Ruiz’s own willingness to flood his movies with narrative information. “In reality, it is stories that possess men.”