A word of advice to anyone who kills his wife's lover, fakes his own death, assumes the dead guy's name, and flees to a seaside Balkan town: leave the camera at home. In Eric Lartigau's chilly, Chabrol-esque thriller, Paul Exben (Romain Duris), a hotshot, uptight, cuckolded Parisian lawyer, learns this lesson the hard way. He also learns that identity may be fluid, but destiny is immutable. Thanks to a unified Europe, Exben has no problem faking a passport and reaching his Adriatic refuge, where he subdues his sweaty paranoia and gradually feels at home. But then he meets a character played by Niels Arestrup, and you know that can't be good. Lartigau employs a detached style, with brief appearances of striking metaphoric imagery, separated by fades to black, evoking a mood of calm doom and free-floating anxiety. As for the big picture, it takes a while to develop, but it shows that even a sordid melodrama like Exben's can have unintended, epiphanic consequences.
