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In the early '70s, director Claude Sautet (A Simple Story, Un coeur en hiver) made this interesting and unusual crime picture - one of four movies from his catalogue where his two favorite actors, Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider, shared lead billing. Piccoli stars as Max, a judge turned police detective who has become the butt of jokes in his department for his consistent tendency to let wily criminals slip through his fingers. Amid this career lull, he crosses paths with old acquaintance Abel (Bernard Fresson) - now a slimy hoodlum dealing in stolen scrap metal. Max sizes up Abel's desire for a big score, and begins to strategically entrap Max and his cronies by luring them into a bank robbery. To engineer the theft, he must assume a fictitious identity and slyly feed information about the bank to Abel's girlfriend Lily (Schneider) -

a prostitute with whom he begins having regular, non-sexual liaisons. Max falls deeply in love with the young woman, however, which threatens to complicate or destroy the set-up.

Sautet was always far more drawn to character motivations and ambiguities than the mechanics of plot, and that is what lifts this picture out of the ordinary, from the realm of formula into something more special. The mechanics of the heist itself receive little attention; instead, the writer-director spends the bulk of screen time on the fascinating relationship between Max and Lily. We recognize the depth of Max's feelings from the moment he first spots her, but what of Lily's capacity for reciprocal affection? There is a single moment here that speaks to the picture's greatness - where Lily, apparently drawn to Max's stoicism and lack of corruption, returns to Abel one evening and is visibly overcome by disgust over the sliminess of her boyfriend. She begins to follow through with the set-up, but is she subconsciously aware that she's being used? For a lengthy stretch of the movie, we have no idea - and as such, those passages are mesmerizing and sustain an unusual level of intrigue. The twist conclusion doesn't work - one hops for an open conversation between the two lead characters, where Max confesses his identity and romantic feelings and self-doubts are disclosed; that doesn't happen, and it's a loss. In fact, Max's final actions challenge the movie's plausibility. Until then it's an enormously enjoyable pas-de-deux, that benefits from a couple of superlative lead performances and Sautet's willingness to defy genre convention.