THE THREE FACES OF EVIL

By RICHARD CORLISS

Noir! The very word sounds like a French lion's growl. In its undiluted form, film noir (named after Serie Noir, a French publisher's line of crime novels) is tart and murky, like cheap Parisian coffee, and as mean as any Marseilles street a gangster could skulk down. These dank moral tales are about the evil that taints everyone--especially the hero, who must end up dead or disgraced. This disqualifies Hollywood neo-noir like L.A. Confidential, where at the fade-out two guys and a gal grin as if they'd just seen Singin' in the Rain. In true noir there is no reprieve.

Maybe we should leave noir to the French and other outsiders; they are less likely to go simple with sentiment. Two handsome films, Jacques Audiard's A Self Made Hero and Arturo Ripstein's Deep Crimson, take a smart, stony-eyed look at chicanery in the '40s. Some cunning insects are on display, and not a tear needs to be shed for them or their victims.

A man lying to himself: that is delusion. A nation lying to itself: that is policy. Thus the death of half a million American Indians is euphemized as manifest destiny. The French, after their craven accommodation to the occupying Nazis, had their own little lie. Collaborators? Mais non--we were all in the Resistance!

A Self Made Hero could be called The Secret Life of Walter Vichy. Albert Dehousse (Mathieu Kassovitz) is a slow-witted fellow with a gift for mimicry. He was not called for war service, so when a true Resistance hero relates his adventures, Albert uses these particulars to dress up his life. He soon finds he needn't tell many lies about himself; others will sketch the rest of his imagined exploits out of their urgent need for heroes.

The film--a deadpan comedy cloaked in noir atmosphere (fog, dark alleys, secret meetings)--does not merely point a gnarled finger at French gullibility; it gets at the universal impulse to create alternative truths. Lying is a way to stay alive. "When Death comes," says Albert, "we'll lie to it. We'll say, 'You've got the wrong guy.'" This anti-Hero leaves an indelible taste, somehow both bitter and savory.

Evil can be passive, like Albert's, or gross, like Coral's in the Mexican Deep Crimson. Coral (Regina Orozco), a nurse, is fat, lazy, a bust at everything but loving Nico (Daniel Gimenez Cacho). Movie-mad Coral wants a man like Charles Boyer. Well, Nico does wear a toupee. And like Boyer in Gaslight, he is a thief of women's affections and inheritances. Coral, at first a mark, proves his accomplice and inspiration. Dumping her two kids in an orphanage and posing as Nico's sister, she prods him to romance, rob and kill his ladies; then the swindlers make sweaty lust in the shed. And why do they do it? "To be together," the lovers say. "United in blood and death."

Based, like the 1970 The Honeymoon Killers, on the case of lonely-hearts murderers Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, this poisonous, beautifully acted tragicomedy exerts a cold fascination. Virtually every scene is a single shot (no intercutting to cue emotion); the camera prowls like a smooth, stealthy voyeur. Yet the film is true to the ferocity of mad love. There is a deep crimson in the couple's passion that, in the end, can only fade to noir.

--By Richard Corliss