Shapely Ironies

By Christopher Porterfield

THE WONDERFUL CROOK Directed and Written by CLAUDE GORETTA

The Wonderful Crook would have given Karl Marx the willies. It describes a diffident young capitalist, Pierre Vauchez, who takes over the family furniture factory after his father's stroke and finds that the business is virtually broke. Pierre cares too much about the workers and their traditional craft to close the factory, so he fakes orders, carts away shipments to be burned secretly and, in his simplest and most desperate expedient, begins pulling armed robberies to meet the payroll. Talk about bourgeois paternalism! Letting the workers profit from the boss's labor may be bad economics, but in the hands of Swiss Director Claude Goretta it is good cinema. Within its modest, admittedly improbable dimensions, Crook could scarcely be more deftly done.

Goretta works in an exhilaratingly quick, dry, uninflected style. He seems to have a horror of squeezing an emotion too hard or dwelling on a scene too long. He depicts a holdup with no more than a breathless glimpse of Pierre fleeing across a supermarket parking lot. He foreshadows the death of Pierre's father by juxtaposing sequences of youthful high spirits on a bicycle with views of the immobile face of the old man.

Through the accumulation of such glancing, oblique details (sensitively photographed by Renato Berta), Goretta builds up a pattern of shapely ironies. Pierre impulsively confides in one of his intended victims, a post office clerk named Nelly Wagner, and she ultimately becomes his mistress and accomplice. Yet, credibly and touchingly. Pierre remains devoted to his wife --Nelly is only his partner in crime. When, as they must, the police catch up with Pierre, his baffled, tearful wife remonstrates, "I'm strong too!" In trying to make up for his father's mistake, he has only repeated it: he has cheated his family out of sharing the burdensome truth.

Goretta. 47. was previously represented in this country only by The Invitation (1975), a Chekhovian study of a disintegrating office party. In Wonderful Crook, the actors readily grasp the same light-handed spirit. Marlene Jobert as Nelly may be a little too refined for a post office clerk, and Gerard Depardieu as Pierre may be low-keyed to the point of occasional inaudibility: but both, along with Dominique Labourier as the wife, give performances of great charm.

Unluckily, coming so soon after Fun with Dick and Jane (TIME. Feb. 7), the movie runs the risk of being dismissed as another middle-class crime caper. But unlike Dick and Jane. Crook yields to no glibness. no gags, no cheap shots at the System. Goretta's comedy arises from sharp but sympathetic observation of the ways in which ordinary, well-meaning people stumble into one sad mess after another. Christopher Porterfield

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