Deneuve Triumphs in ‘Crime’

Catherine Deneuve’s career is as enduring as her beauty because she has always taken roles that rely as much on her talent as her looks.

With Portuguese fabulist Raul Ruiz’s brilliant, bravura “Genealogies of a Crime” she has taken on one of her most challenging, complex films ever with the intelligence and willingness to reveal vulnerability that are the hallmarks of her performances.

In its style and daring it’s right up there with Deneuve’s classic Bun~uel collaborations, “Belle du Jour” and “Tristana,” and is as demanding of her as an actress as such recent films as the Academy Award-winning “Indochine,” which brought her an Oscar nomination, and “Ma Saison Preferee.”

In this psychological mystery, a Chinese puzzle of a movie, Deneuve plays dual roles. As Solange, she is a poised, successful Paris lawyer, a widow who, just as she has lost her 20-year-old son in a car crash, agrees to defend a young man, Rene (Melvil Poupaud), accused of murdering his psychoanalyst aunt, Jeanne (played by Deneuve, in a red wig and gowned glamorously by Yves St. Laurent).

Associated with the Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytical Society run by the sinister, volatile Georges (Michel Piccoli), Jeanne has become convinced that Rene, whom she’s seen from the time he was a young boy, would grow up to be a criminal and that nothing could be done about it. Solange will argue, however, that Jeanne’s years of analysis with her nephew programmed him to kill.

It would seem that consciously or unconsciously Jeanne made herself the target through her incest-tinged relationship with her nephew. Or was Jeanne somehow a pawn of Piccoli and his followers, rumored to engage in orgies and to embezzle large sums of money? Or is Rene simply a “bad seed,” a case of pure primeval evil?

As Solange becomes caught up in defending Rene, she probes the bizarre world of Jeanne, who lived in a 19th century Gothic mansion, a former luxury brothel whose suffocatingly chi-chi decor she left unchanged--except to have her likeness replace the portraits of the prostitutes who once worked there.

All the while “Genealogies” is unfolding, Ruiz is having fun with the proclamations of the warring schools of psychoanalysis--Andrzej Seweryn plays Georges’ principal opponent, the unctuous Christian. Abounding with baffling cinematic sleight-of-hand, “Genealogies” is at once funny and serious, a tragicomedy that debates free will and predestination.

It also abounds in scintillating portrayals from a large cast and what Ruiz calls “melancholy, Chekhovian flavor,” created by his production designers and cinematographer. A work of the utmost wit, intellectual sophistication and originality--Ruiz disposes, thankfully, of Rene’s trial in a collage of courtroom sketches--”Genealogies of a Crime” is the kind of film likely to inspire no end of discussion and interpretation.

By the end of the picture “Genealogies” illustrates the quote from Saint-Just that opens it: “Nothing so resembles virtue as true crime.”

* Unrated. Times guidelines: some violence, complex adult themes and style.

‘Genealogies of a Crime’

Catherine Deneuve: Jeanne/Solange

Michel Piccoli: Georges

Melvil Poupaud: Rene

Andrzej Seweryn: Christian

A Strand Releasing presentation of a Gemini Films production with the participation of Canal Plus & CNC with the support of Procirep. Director Raul Ruiz. Executive producer Paulo Branco. Screenplay and story by Ruiz and Pascal Bonitzer. Cinematographer Stefan Ivanov. Editor Valeria Sarmiento. Costumes Elisabeth Tavernier. Music Jorge Arriagada. Production designers Luc Chalon and Solange Zeitoun. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.