J Paul Johnson
Much of what goes on and how in The Other Laurens is intriguing, even occasionally engaging. Its plot is a bit garden-variety heist thriller-with-an-identity-twist, something you are sure to see coming whenever a narrative relies on its protagonist having a twin. Several of its cast, especially newcomer Louise Leroy, deliver memorable performances. The film’s settings and scenery are at times dazzling, especially at a tiny French estate and later across its countryside in a dizzying aerial climax. And visually, the film is often stunning, a neon-noir traipse through a labyrinth of double-crosses, revelations, and reversals.
All of that is largely for naught, though, for two reasons. First, there is little reason given to care what happens. Olivier Rabourdin, who was named Best Actor at Brussels International Film Festival, plays down-on-his-luck private detective Gabriel Laurens. His niece, Jade (Leroy), a rebellious young beauty, asks him to investigate her father’s—Gabriel’s mostly-estranged identical twin brother’s—death. That investigation leads the two of them into an underworld of sex, drugs, and trafficking swirling around the dead brother’s American widow, Shelby (Kate Moran), her ex-Marine lover (Edwin Gaffney) and her biker-brigade of henchmen/security guards led by Valery (a sufficiently imposing Marc Barbé). A familial relationship almost develops between Gabriel and Jade as something of an odd couple mismatched in age and values, and if Gabriel were written with any character traits at all besides his Columbo-style scraggle and shuffle, The Other Laurens’ plot might matter a little.
The film’s narrative, especially in its third act, makes clear that the budding paternal relationship between crusty Gabriel and his newfound niece is not at the core of the film. Instead the investigation itself predominates, but it too is ultimately uninteresting, just a trail of false leads and decoys until next to no one is left to shoot or stab and the final revelation regarding the twins’ identity is just a little too pat. Viewers might well enjoy themselves far more conjecturing up potential conclusions to the film’s narrative than they will subjecting themselves to the tedium of the one playing out onscreen. And there is the film’s second major problem: it seems to be about virtually nothing save for its own genre-traipsing exercise.
At best, there is, several levels beneath subtext, the germ of an idea about the two older twin brothers representing a decaying and misogynistic patriarchy which the young niece Jade must work to deconstruct. In fact, that would make for a damned good film. But The Other Laurens does not do that: instead, it focuses all of its narrative agency on middle-aged Gabriel, a man largely without character or traits (he never seems particularly intelligent, resourceful, or charismatic; he simply plods along with the investigation) that make him in any way interesting. Perhaps his only truly defining characteristic is a plot device: that he happens to be the twin of a dead man.
Were The Other Laurens to fully present itself as a feminist deconstruction of the thriller genre’s tired tropes, it would make Leroy’s vibrant young Jade its point-of-view character. A young woman whose father is killed under mysterious circumstances, whose stepmother is uncaring and suspicious, whose newfound uncle is a dead ringer for dad willing to help investigate his murder, and who must set aside her adolescent interests for a pursuit of the truth—now that’s a character and a plot I could get behind. And Leroy seems like an ideal find for an actor up to the task. But while she is onscreen plenty of The Other Laurens‘ runtime, her Jade has precious little to do. It’s never her actions or intentions that drive the plot; she seems to have had no discernible relationship with her father and never develops one with her uncle; and even at the film’s conclusion, she’s played no real role in getting there. She’s just been along for the ride.
That Leroy is watchable under those circumstances is testament to the actor’s budding talent. I’m looking forward to seeing her in a role with greater depth and agency. Here, though, like the film’s settings and visual style, those efforts are wasted in the service of a narrative that matters little and means even less. Much of the film is shot around Perpignan, just kilometers from the Spanish border, on the set of a White House replica, the Château de Rastignac in Dordogne’s countryside, with other scenes taking place in the neon and rain of the region’s nearby nightclubs. All of that works well for a film that traverses several genres—familial melodrama, heist thriller, neo(n)-noir, and dark comedy (even if the film is itself unfunny, at least in ways that transcend borders).
Somewhere in an alternate universe there may be a version of The Other Laurens that stars Leroy and centers her Jade, telling the story of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood suddenly thrust into the middle of a murder mystery with only her grief and wits to fuel her and a dead-ringer schlump of an uncle to guide her. Were it told with the same visual verve as this film but with better pacing, more convincing performances, and a stronger sense of theme, it just might be one of those films that gets it all right. But most of the joy in watching The Other Laurens comes from conjecturing what it might have been, instead of what it is.
