by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

The French cinematic imagination has clearly been captured by the story of Jean-Claude Romand, resulting in two feature films in the last two years alone. It's easy to see why. In 1993, this middle-aged Frenchman murdered his entire extended family before attempting suicide. The investigations that followed revealed he had been masquerading as a doctor for 18 years, fooling his family and friends into thinking he was employed by the World Health Organization in Geneva. In reality, he hadn't even passed his medical exams; before the crisis hit, he spent his time driving around, watching TV in airport hotels and reading in his car.

The first movie to take on his story was last year's critically lauded Time Out. The latest movie to do so is L'Adversaire, directed by Nicole Garcia and adapted from the Emmanuel Carrère book of the same title. It stars big gun Daniel Auteuil, and he plays the part with a chilling and relentless grace. The film treats the five years before the murders, referring to earlier events through investigators' questioning of those close to the central character, here named Jean-Marc Faure, such as his mistress - whom he attempts to kill - and his best friend since medical school (also, surprisingly, a doctor).

The power of this film is owed at least in part to its skillful narrative, which weaves back and forth between the frozen moments directly after the incidents of the climactic day and earlier, causal events. The novel (and film) imagine several moments when Faure's wife questions him about inconsistencies, tense moments when the entire architecture of deception appears on the verge of collapse.

Mostly though, the success of L'Adversaire resides in its ability to cinematically evoke the grotesque theatricality of the story itself. Faure's false life depends, above all, on his continued capacity to supply an income suited to the needs of a young family. That he does so for almost two decades and with so few obstacles, by quietly defrauding friends and family members of hundreds of thousands of francs placed with him to invest in Swiss bank accounts, reflects the pathos of his middle-class family existence.

L'Adversaire opens Friday, July 4

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