L'Etoile du Nord

Clearly borrowing both inspiration and key personnel from the Bertrand Tavernier school of eccentric thrillers, Granier-Deferre teases this Simenon adaptation towards irresistible absurdity. The brilliant Noiret is a forgetful killer on the lam, spinning exotic yarns to fend off compound disappointments and derangements (prompting the film to incongruous cross-fades between the Belgian boarding-house where he's staying and his previous home in Egypt), stirring in his ageing landlady (Signoret) the memory of her own long-abandoned dreams of 'escape', and cueing several nice black ironies about travel broadening the mind. There's a flighty femme fatale, a murder on a train, dirty money burnt - but all the conventions of the genre make scant impression on Noiret's fantastic fakir act. Which, however you look at it, is the only conceivable abiding impression of this incoherent, oddball joy.