August 12–19, 1999
movie shorts
Like a well made, tasteful objet d’art, Claude Chabrol’s The Swindle pleases the eye without ever awakening the mind, offering a delicately told tale of intrigue and corruption without ever awakening the basic human passions which are supposedly its subject. Isabelle Huppert and Michel Serrault play a pair of small-time con artists who have just happened on the idea for their biggest score — not a promising place to start. While Huppert certainly plays her treacherous, seductive character to the hilt, it’s Serrault, with his slightly prim career criminal, who proves the more interesting of the two, a lecherous old codger so stripped of morality he doesn’t even seem evil, just naturally primed to take advantage of others’ weaknesses. The romantic and professional jealousy between the two keeps the pot boiling for a while, but the film’s prolonged and none-too-interesting climax, which has to do with their inadvertently taking off a drug courier, has neither the intensity nor the force to sustain its length.