Altogether the movie is self-consciously French, which means it also acknowledges the national fascination with conventional American westerns and crime movies in the figure of Milan, who dresses in black leather, carries a photo of himself he tells Manesquier was taken in Nevada, and robs banks--and is played by Hallyday, a national icon precisely because he made inexportable rock-'n'-roll for the French. At one point Manesquier sneaks into Milan's room, tries on his fringed leather jacket, and pretends to be Wyatt Earp in the mirror. The desire to imitate American pop culture is acknowledged but contained, as if this kind of appropriation operated as a barrier against contamination. Similarly, though Milan has come to the town to rob a bank with his old gang, the crime is handled fairly gently--as close to Mario Monicelli's I Soliti ignoti (1958; released here as Big Deal on Madonna Street), a whimsical, characterful slapstick comedy about a failed heist, as it is to the blood-and-guts American gangster pictures of the '30s.

Manesquier fantasizes about being an outlaw, and has Milan give him shooting lessons, but at the end he tries to talk him out of the robbery, which is to take place as he himself will undergo surgery. (You know how the robbery will end because Milan's accomplices are either broken-down or losers or both. The best touch is that he hooks up with one of them at a museum, where the guy knowledgeably discusses the minor masters on display.) The basic narrative structure is a romance based on an allegorical comparison between light and dark versions of the same identity: the man on the train and the man rooted in the ancestral home; the man encumbered with a piano and the man who tootles on the pocket-sized harmonica. You find this kind of salt-and-pepper romance in American movies in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999; Patricia Highsmith's fascinating source novel was first made into a movie in France in 1960 called Plein soleil, released in the U.S. as Purple Noon); Face/Off (1997); Single White Female (1992); the Bette Davis good-and-bad twin movies Dead Ringer (1964) and A Stolen Life (1946); and plenty of others.

Leconte's version is understated by comparison, first of all because there's no baleful attempt by one man to swipe the other's life. There are only the most casual passes at identity switching: Manesquier forgets about a lesson and is out of the house when his pupil shows up and so Milan, having crammed the tobacco from a Gitane into one of Manesquier's pipes, puffs as he quizzes the boy about Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, replicating the professor's failings as a tutor. In fact, there's not much action at all: Manesquier muses aloud about Milan's existence while the robber simply broods. It's only at the end, when it's too late for both of them, that we see each more fully acting out the other's existence, and Leconte doesn't get too fancy about it.