Odd Couple

OR a film about a jewellery heist, what catches the eye right at the start of Claude Schmitz’s Conrad and Crab—Idiotic Gems is the group of actors of Indian descent in walk-on roles of dealers of opals and amethysts. But beyond this, there is much more that is unusual about the investigation into the theft of a 40,000-euro ring, supposedly from a local bar in the small French town of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

While sticking to the popular template of buddy cop movies, Belgian filmmaker-writer Schmitz reinvents the detective genre stylistically and more specifically in its exploration of a place, people, situations, and relationships, and most of all emotions.

The France-Belgium co-production, which premiered in the Harbour section at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in February, is the second in Schmitz’s Conrad and Crab films, the first, L'Autre Laurens (The Other Laurens), having premiered in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, in which Francis Conrad and Alain Crab were secondary characters. In this spin-off, once again played by Francis Soetens and Rodolphe Burger, the ineffective investigators become the centre of things, hired as security personnel for the town’s International Mineral Show, until the missing jewel calls upon them to step up beyond providing security.