Capsule: The Other Laurens
Am I My Brother’s Gumshoe?
A jaded private detective who gets dragooned by his niece into investigating the suspicious death of his twin brother sounds like a pretty good set-up for a modern-day noir mystery. The Belgian film The Other Laurens takes good advantage of the scenario, delivering a lot of delicious details. Is there a bit of mistaken identity? Of course, plus an evil stepmother, her PTSD-riddled “brother,” a ruthless drug-runner, his superstitious flunkies, a couple of corrupt cops, and, for some reason, a corps of aging bikers. Co-writer/director Claude Schmitz keeps the scenario nicely balanced between wacky and deadly, never letting the tongue-in-cheek ambiance diminish how serious things are for the characters involved.
The thing that keeps the film from fully revving to speed is that gumshoe. As played by Olivier Rabourdin, Gabriel Laurens (see, I bet you thought the title referred to two women) is a beaten-down, world-weary husk of a human, burdened with crushing debt – he repeatedly has to bum gas money off his niece, Jade (Louise Leroy) – and nursing a bitter animosity toward his more successful and now deceased brother (for a good reason that I will not reveal here).
Rabourdin manages to imbue Gabriel with a good portion of touching humanity, but he fails to bring any edge to his portrayal. We never feel that the character is gaining control of the situation – too many times he seems a bystander, not so much unravelling the mystery as getting dragged from one situation to another. That includes the way he’s treated in the film’s ultra-fatalistic finale, with director Schmitz making the fatal mistake of cutting away to Jade at a moment when we should be hanging around with the detective. The Other Laurens offers up the cynical feast we expect from the birthplace of existentialism, but it’s sunk so deep into its own resignation that it lacks the bitter energy that makes the philosophy so compelling.