by Stephen Leonard

Created on: March 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Pars Vite et Reviens Tard, a Film that Lives Up to Its Name But Not in a Good Way

Pars vite et reviens tard' translates to Leave quickly and come back late'.

When that's your movie's title, the movie better be good.

Otherwise, it's just going to seem like good advice.

Rgis Wargnier's thriller, based on the Fred Vargas novel of the same name, unfortunately leaves one wanting to run from the theater and not come back until well after they've finished cleaning up the spilled popcorn and M&Ms.

Novelist Fred Vargas is one of a solid stable of French polar' writers, along with the much bloodier Jean-Christophe Grang, a former journalist, and young Maxime Chattam, most of whose novels take place in the U.S.A.

What makes Vargas different is that she's a woman, for one thing, and most of her novels take place exclusively within Paris.

The film, keeping with the book's premise, concerns a mysterious series of announcements called out by Joss Le Guern (Olivier Gourmet), a modern-day Parisian town crier, whose usual batch of petits annonces' involves harmless love notes, want-ads, and small items for sale.

In the novel, Le Guern is a briny ex-boat captain from Brittany (Bretagne), haunted by a long-ago sea accident and occasionally visited by the ghost of his 19th century ancestor, who actually gives him the idea to become a town crier in his Montparnasse neighborhood in Paris.

(As Montparnasse train station is the departure and arrival point for Brittany, the surrounding neighborhood is traditionally known for its Breton influence, which one sees to this day in the numerous crperies that line the streets.)

While the weathered Gourmet, shaved bald with a thick earring in his left ear, looks the part, for some reason the film's screenwriters have chosen to morph him into a failed actor, who becomes a town crier as a sort of public art performance thing outside the Centre Pompidou, in Paris' Beaubourg neighborhood, where he entertains tourists and locals, who pay him to read their announcements every day.

When Le Guern's announcements start including cryptic messages about a return of the Black Plague, coinciding with the appearance of a bizarre symbol that resembles a backwards 4 painted on doors throughout the city, Vargas' police chief Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg sets out to solve the mystery and stop a serial killer.

Adamsberg, interpreted by Jos Garcia, is too preoccupied with his estranged girlfriend Camille, though, to give his full attention to solving the case.

This weak girlfriend

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