Directed by Emmanuel Carrere

Written by Jerome Beaujour and Emmanuel Carrere

Starring: Vincent Lindon, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric and Hippolyte Girardot

86 minutes

If the hair that you ripped from your head after seeing Cache has finally grown back, here is a new existential French suspense thriller that’s bound to leave you with an alopecia bouffant.

From its opening sights and sounds, a film should instantly set a tone and point of view to be followed and built upon during the course of however many minutes. Underneath La Moustache’s credits a distant light dances across waves at night. It will take a few reels before this watery image reappears. It comes back just about the same time you begin to wonder whether or not these characters are insane, ’cause they’re certainly not on the Seine anymore.

Marc (Vincent Lindon), an upper-middle class architect, sits in a scalding bath wondering aloud, “What if I shaved my moustache off?” Agnes approves of Marc’s bristles; “I don’t know you without it,” she assures her husband. It’s a safe bet that a more loaded line of dialogue will not be delivered all year.

Not until a contemplative gaze in a mirror followed by total submersion in the tub does the purposely withheld opening title appear. We watch as Marc meticulously takes scissors, soap and razor to his upper lip. It’s a good thing he remembers where he filed his old shaves. They will come in handy later on when Marc ransacks a trash bin in search of the discarded whiskers and his sanity.

Initially, Marc turns things into a game by doing his best to mask the recent deletion with sweatshirts and bath towels. Despite the fact that Agnes fully expects Marc to notice her “tarty” attire, she fails to acknowledge his new look. Even worse, when finally confronted she swears up and down that her husband never wore a moustache.

Close friends side with Agnes. A passport picture and dozens of vacation photos, which Agnes handles but never examines, are proof that a moustache once existed. Even a puzzled cop at a photo booth is quick to validate Marc’s claim. Is our hero going mad? Can one small action, no matter how thoroughly calculated, throw one man’s universe completely out of whack? Was Gaslight on Agnes’ Netflix list?

This is novelist and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrere’s second directorial effort. (I must have been sick the week his first feature, Return to Kotelnitch, opened, and it is not available on DVD.) Some were quick to complain that a film that clocks in at a little under the 90-minute mark shouldn’t drag.

In one hotly contested scene, Marc repeatedly travels back and forth from one Hong Kong harbor to another. Those plot-junkies impatiently waiting for “something to happen” didn’t pick up on the filmmaker’s interpretation of a character desperate to find some continuum in his life.

After a second viewing, several of the pieces still don’t add up, but that’s okay. La Moustache is all about character, paranoia, love and betrayal, madness, conspiracy theories and just about everything but story. On those levels, it’s a smashing suspense thriller. Just don’t try to make too much sense of it.

For a hair-raising good time, try your best to see this one on a double-bill with Fur.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Written and directed by Emilio Estevez

Starring: William H. Macy, Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Laurence Fishburne, Lindsay Lohan, Helen Hunt, Emilio Estevez and David Kobzantsev as Sirhan Sirhan

120 minutes in CinemaScope

During the past month, multiplexes unleashed a re-enactment of the death of the future queen of England and the pseudo-documentary murder of George W. Bush, and now triple-threat Emilio Estevez “re-imagines” the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. While the war rages on, dead politicians seem to be quite the rage in Movieland.

According to the poster for Bobby: “He saw wrong and tried to right it. He saw suffering and tried to heal it. He saw war and tried to stop it.” Too bad surviving brother Teddy didn’t put down his Chivas long enough to preview the script and repeal it.

As a writer, Emilio Estevez has crafted a lumbering version of a not-so-Grand Hotel. He goes so far as to quote the film’s most famous line, “The people come, the people go.” Set it afloat and you’d have a special two-hour dramatic movie-of-the-week spin-off of “The Love Boat.”

The film chronicles the personal dramas of 22 fictional characters who all wind up at Los Angeles’ famed Ambassador Hotel on the night of June 5, 1968. Sharon Stone, running headlong into her Jackie Stallone period, is the hotel hairdresser married to manager William H. Macy, who is making time with switchboard operator Heather Graham. Macy fires Christian Slater for some mildly racist comments, and Slater in turn alerts Stone to the affair. Ms. Stone is saddled with such sagacious pearls as: “We’re all whores. Some of us get paid.”

Seniors won’t be disappointed as they watch doorman Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte whiling away their afternoon together waxing cute about old age. I’m sure Mr. Estevez found resonance in an Irishman and a Negro united by a chessboard in the midst of the civil rights movement.

For the teenagers in the audience, there is Lindsay Lohan as a nice girl who spares her “good friend” Elijah Wood a trip to Vietnam by consenting to be his bride. And what would a Kennedy film be without Emilio’s dad, Martin Sheen? Not counting The Dead Zone, Mr. Sheen has twice portrayed Bobby’s older brother. He and Helen Hunt play a bickering married couple who appear to have stepped out of a Carnival Cruise Lines brochure.

There are plenty of should-have-been-left-on-the-cutting-room-floor scenes involving Brian Geraghty and Shia Labeouf as a pair of Youth for Kennedy volunteers who decide to blow off their Election Day campaigning in favor of tuning in and turning on with Ashton Kutcher.

The only even remotely amusing bit of casting is Estevez playing a pussy-whipped, pooch-toting husband opposite former real-life lover Demi Moore’s Vegas superstar renown for her song stylings as well as an insatiable thirst for scotch. Ms. Moore’s wigs scream Liz Taylor, while the actor-turned-spouse-turned-manager relationship suggests Ann-Margret and Roger Smith.

The screenplay is overburdened with obvious irony. An election official clearly spells out “Card Hole Aggregate Debris” as an acronym for those 2004 election-spoiling chads. Even talk of that current hot-button debate, illegal immigration, is added for paradoxical ballast.

With no idea how to pull it all together, Estevez resorts to file footage underscored by RFK’s narration. An attempt to match grainy stock footage of Kennedy’s final speech with staged events fails miserably. It would have been wiser to rely on cutaways to television monitors.

Legend has it that that Estevez completed the script one week before 9/11. Given all the coincidence, heavy-handed moralizing, and vast and sundry characters, I was shocked to learn that it pre-dated Crash.

Prior to this, Estevez directed the garbage-man comedy Men at Work, the imperceptive Wisdom and the unintentionally uproarious political drama The War at Home. Leave it to him to turn Bobby into The Ambassador.

Rating: 1 star