Michel Jussieu (Maurice Ronet) is a film producer, sitting in the office of a detective Malterer (Sacha Pitoeff). Malterer, by the way, works the murder cases in his present day of 1960s Paris. Michel tells Malterer that his memory of what he saw in the Playboy club is blurry. By the way, Michel is one of the witnesses in a murder that took place in that club. Malterer tells Michel that his blurry memory happens often to knocked out boxers. This makes sense because someone hit the latter over the head when he was at the club.

Thing is, Michel knows more than what he’s letting on, and he decides to play detective instead of telling Malterer everything he knows. He’s even roping his wife Elsa (Francoise Brion) into his new side hustle. The movie he’s in is Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s La Denonciation. And it flashes back to the reason why his possible cooperation with the police is similar to a thing he did a few decades ago.

That thing, by the way, is finding himself in prison during the German occupation of France and having to snitch on his fellow resistance fighters. The movie, then has some interesting ideas that echo throughout its scenes. Michel walks the Parisian streets with a sense of outrage that the people around him don’t feel the sense of decay that fills the those avenues. In reality, war was decades ago, but to him feels like mere hours.

Similarly, it feels like they just hauled someone’s body out in the Playboy Club minutes ago. But his present moment doesn’t allow him to mourn that stranger. The show must go on in the club, the people around him dressed to the nines. Those same people have dead expressions on their face while Michel looks intently at one of the club’s performers, Eleonore Germain (Nicole Berger). He’s convincing himself that she has something to do with the murder.

La Denonciation doesn’t always know how to present those ideas. Or at least those ideas manifest themselves through slivers, and it feels like it’s up to the viewers to fill in the gaps. There are also a lot of distractions here, especially when it comes to the subplots involving Elsa. The narration describing Elsa with cringe worthy phrases like her doing Arabian dances for him. Another thing he says is that her only concern is her beauty, as if Doniol-Valcroze has never met a woman before, or as if a woman didn’t give birth to him or raise him. Thankfully, Michel returns to the screen, giving the film the depth that it probably didn’t have during the script phrase. His performance has that intensity to elevate a tonally inconsistent film.

Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s films are coming soon on OVID.