DARK AFFAIRS DOMINATE `THIEVES'.

Byline: Henry Sheenan Orange County Register

``Thieves (Les Voleurs)'' is the third feature from French filmmaker Andre Techine to open stateside in a little more than 12 months, after years of a virtual embargo on this prominent director's work.

Yet the sudden rush (the earlier movies were ``Wild Reeds'' and ``Ma Saison Preferee'') isn't the result of a released bottleneck so much as a reflection of just how quickly and frequently this prodigious filmmaker works.

So now we're getting a sense of just how remarkable Techine is, because this impressive quantity is more than matched by a non-pareil psychological acuity and formal elegance. Complexity is always accompanied by clarity.

So even when Techine appears to be circling around an issue, he's actually getting right to the point. ``Thieves'' opens with such apparent indirection when, deep into the night in his Alpine home, a 10-year-old boy, Justin (Julien Riviere), is awakened by sounds downstairs, sounds that turn out to be the arrival of his just-murdered father, Ivan (Didier Bezace).

Justin would thus appear to be lucky to have a police detective in the family, his uncle Alex (Daniel Auteuil), but as it turns out, Alex is the black sheep in a family whose fortunes have always been tied up in its own criminal businesses. Alex and Ivan were, in fact, almost violently estranged, and not just despite Ivan's attempts at reconciliation, but because of them; Alex, not incorrectly, saw the overtures as a way to seduce him and his insider status back into the family car-theft ring.

While this would appear to be enough complications for any movement, this strange family grouping is only a starting point for a story that soon splits away from Justin's perspective and picks up not just a new point of view with Alex but also goes into the past a few months to begin filling out the mysterious circumstances surrounding Ivan's death.

It was back then that Alex first arrested Juliette (Laurence Cote), a tenement-spawned petty crook, with whom he would start a sexually torrid but emotionally barren affair, even when her activities and those of her more criminally ambitious brother, Jimmy (Benoit Magimel), led back to his brother Ivan's plots.

All this plot is easy enough to follow, and it's a good thing, too, because Techine is not all that interested in it, except as a way of setting up a series of strange and exploitative relationships. For while the title refers on one obvious level to the crooks whose thievery runs throughout the movie, it also refers to another kind of theft, one that leaves people their possessions but robs them of their feelings.

Again, Techine pursues even this more nuanced definition through different levels and degrees. Alex, for example, is stealing from Juliette when he demands sexual obedience almost to the point of humiliation. But even this tough cop, who soon takes over the movie's dramatic core, finds some essential part of him stolen by Juliette.

The increasing anxiety over that very point eventually leads Alex to Marie (Catherine Deneuve), Juliette's philosophy teacher at a local college and a lifelong heterosexual who has plunged into an obsessive affair with her student. But while Marie is able to describe their relative plight to Alex, there's little she can do to help even herself out of it.

Techine leads us through these encounters with a visual style that is extraordinarily sophisticated yet virtually never calls attention to itself. Within scenes, he moves the camera around so that physical arrangements are either being elaborated upon or shifted; first one character dominates, then another; now a scene is encumbered by darkness and shadow, then everything moves into plain sunlight. The result isn't the revelation of a deception - though it occasionally is that - so much as a demonstration of Techine's belief that more than one interpretation is required of any human relationship.

And still, Techine is able to keep us guessing about what really happened the night that ended up with Ivan dead in his own front room. That it's only one mystery, and the least mystery, among many others, helps make ``Thieves'' entertaining as well as compelling.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Thieves (Les Voleurs)'' (R; sexuality, nudity, language and some violence).

The stars: Daniel Auteuil, Catherine Deneuve.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Andre Techine.

Running time: One hour, 57 minutes.

Playing: Selected theaters, including the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino.

Our rating: Four Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Catherine Deneuve plays Marie, a teacher obsessively involved with a student, in ``Thieves (Les Voleurs).''