Whether the scenes add up to anything or not, however, Duris holds the screen like a natural--even in fragments. It's a darkly glinting performance, glimpsed piecemeal and on the fly as if the movie were projected on a cascade of broken glass. American stars don't provide much in the way of smoldering anymore; Duris thus seems to be in greater communication with certain intense commonwealth actors--Daniel Day-Lewis, principally, but also Clive Owen, Colin Farrell. There's drama simply in the changeable interplay of the shiny black eyes, the expanse of upper teeth poised over the generous underlip, all of which come together in the most ambiguous vulpine smile in movies. (You may not remember him from James Ivory's Le Divorce (2003), that contemporary transatlantic Jamesian melodrama, which makes the French mother and son the villains but at the same time expects us to share its gruesomely self-satisfied francophilic consumerism. In it Duris's smile is miniaturized under a troll-doll hair-do and comes off as merely quirkily provocative.) As Audiard says of his star, "I couldn't just point a camera at anyone. Romain stimulates one's appetite. One wants to move around him, to watch the way he moves."

As Tom, a man who both fights his feelings and acts them out all over town, Duris has the intuitive control to underplay without making Tom seem obscure or remote. He couples some of the distinctive qualities of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, bottle and bottle rocket, respectively, in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), without benefit of that movie's masterful script and direction--something Keitel himself failed to do in Fingers. Tom is blocked and yet his turmoil has undeniable impact, as preposterous as it is. The wonder of Duris's acting is that he enables us to focus on Tom's mess rather than Audiard's. There's more to Duris as Tom than there is to Tom as written, which is one way you know you've been watching not just a star but a star who can act.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.