The first feature by 26-year-old Georgian Géla Babluani, 13 Tzameti coasts on free-floating dread and alienation for fully a third of its length. (The title translates as 13 Thirteen.) Sébastien, played by Georges Babluani, the director's younger brother, is a shaggy-haired Georgian immigrant who shares a cramped apartment with numerous family members. (Or at least, we might presume they're family; Babluani isn't big on exposition.) While he's repairing an elderly Frenchman's roof, Sébastien accidentally rips though the ceiling and overhears the man say that he expects to come into a large sum of money as soon as his instructions arrive. The striped envelope that arrives the next day yields only a train ticket and a hotel reservation, but it's enough to scare the man into a deliberate overdose. (It's not clear if he's a drug addict, or terminally ill, or both, but he's clearly not expecting to live long.) The old man's death ends Sébastien's contract, and the late fellow's daughter refuses to pay him for the work he's done, assuming that Sébastien has no legal recourse. But then fate intervenes: The mysterious envelope blows out the window and into Sébastien's hands, and he decides to follow through on whatever it was the old man was so excited and frightened about.

UNKINDEST CUT: Vincent Lindon makes his fateful shave; Emmanuelle Devos looks on.

What happens next isn't exactly a surprise, but if you haven't seen the trailer and don't want to know, skip down until you see the word "moustache." After a few zigzags and double-backs, Sébastien ends up at a deserted farmhouse in the woods, where a group of rich men are gathered to wager on a game of Russian roulette in which he has unwittingly made himself a contestant. And that's where the movie stays for most of the next hour, wringing endless variations on the dread that precedes each pull of the trigger. Babluani is a fluid technician, and he stages his circle-jerk killings with ominous grace, the camera circling the striped light bulb whose illumination signals the commencement of hostilities. But he abstracts himself into a corner, stripping away complexities until only the mechanics show. An elemental knowledge of movies is all it takes to predict which of the 13 contestants will make it to the final round (the one with the most lines, naturally, and the most colorfully grotesque of his fellows). Babluani's evident command of the camera has generated some excitement on the festival circuit, and the movie's devilishly sadistic premise is already slated for the American remake it deserves. But for all his flourishes, when Babluani pulls his hand out of the top hat, there's nothing in it. You can read it as a veiled allegory on the exploitation of immigrants, but that's like calling Cap'n Crunch nutritious because the milk has calcium in it.

The first scene of La Moustache couldn't be more mundane. Marc Thiriez (Vincent Lindon), still moist from his shower, looks into his bathroom mirror and muses, "I think I'll shave my moustache." His wife, Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos) replies idly, "I don't know you without it."

Exactly who knows whom, and without what, becomes a matter of great concern when Marc removes his upper-lip fuzz and finds that neither his wife, nor his friends and co-workers, can remember he ever had it. At first, he toys with Agnès, shielding the lower half of his face with a towel as she steps out of the bath. But when the towel comes down, there's no shriek of surprise. You can see the puppy-dog hurt in his eyes, like a man who's just gotten what he thinks of as a snazzy new haircut and can't believe no one else sees the difference.

From here, you might expect Emmanuelle Carrère's tough, controlled film to turn into a bittersweet comedy, one where Marc discovers that the people he thought loved and respected him turn out to barely notice him at all. (The American version would star Jim Carrey, in a melancholy mood.) But Carrère isn't after laughs, and so he spins poor Marc's disillusion into an existential crisis. If his wife isn't playing a game on him — and good luck trying to see beyond the surface of Devos' ice-cold features — perhaps he's losing his mind, or the world is simply falling apart around him. There's even an instant, fleeting though it is, when it seems the movie's about to turn into a particularly outlandish film noir, one where Marc's wife and boss have been scheming to drive him insane by lying about his facial hair. Sadly, no dice.

Carrère, who based the script on his own novel, resists not only explanations but any hint of them. An unreconstructed surrealist, he tells his story in symbols but rejects their interpretation, which is to say that he doesn't want Marc's moustache or lack thereof to represent anything except moustacheness or inmoustachitude. (No doubt the Germans have a word for that.) This is fine for about half the movie's length, but once Carrère has successfully tied your brain in knots, he's got nowhere to go. One minute Marc's delusion, or that of everyone around him, is expanding beyond the reaches of his face, the next he's decamped to Hong Kong, where he spends a long and rather excruciating day taking the ferry to Kowloon and back. There's simply not enough to Carrère's idea to sustain a feature-length film, and the longer it goes on, the more you wish he'd quit while he was ahead. La Moustache could have made a flawless, if minor, 50-minute short. It still might be, if you leave early enough.

(sam@citypaper.net)