The title of Claude Chabrol's last film, La Ceremonie, refers to the Revolution-era ritual that preceded the beheading of an aristocrat. In that film, a well-to-do family headed by Jacqueline Bisset hires a young maid who is harboring a secret or two. [Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want the film's secrets ruined for you.] At the end of the film, Ms. Bisset and her entire family, husband and kids, are shotgunned to death by the maid and a friend, played Isabelle Huppert, who's a postal employee (apparently postal employees are insane in France, too). Coming after 2 hours of what was essentially a domestic comedy, this murder should have been incredibly shocking. Unfortunately, the gunshots look phony, and after the family is murdered, the camera lingers on their bloody bodies splayed about the room long enough for viewers to see that they are breathing. Chabrol provided a long build-up, and then when it came time for the pay-off, he blew it.

A con flick is pretty much all pay-off. From The Sting to House of Games, whether the con succeeds or fails the pleasure of the film is in the pay-off and in the twists along the way. The reliance on plot turnabouts and a satisfying conclusion to provide entertainment value may make the con flick the most American of genres. And here Chabrol, who screwed up that pay-off in La Ceremonie, is taking a crack at the genre.

The Swindle (Rien ne va plus) is about a male-female team of con artists. He is Victor, played by Michel Serrault, the gray-haired veteran and affectionate mentor to Betty, played by Isabelle Huppert from La Ceremonie, looking the knockout during the early parts of the film when she's a brunette. Their standard con is for Betty to pick up some conventioneer at a hotel or casino, drug his drink, get him up to his room and then rob him just enough that he won't notice he's been robbed.

They've got a pretty big flat, so it must be fairly lucrative. As con artists often do, the pair get in over their heads when they find themselves at a resort in the Swiss Alps with the opportunity to snatch a briefcase containing 5 million Swiss Francs. By my math that's 1.6 trillion American dollars, but I may have gotten the rate of exchange wrong. As is expected from the genre there are crosses and double-crosses and ostensible surprises.

But the con flick, being that most American of genres, requires those plot twists to sell it. And in The Swindle, the plot twists don't really fly. Either they're predictable, or just confusing. Why, for example, after Victor gets the cash does he just sit around on a lounge chair waiting for the money's owner to come after him? It turns out to be a mistake, of course, but I couldn't see any logic to it in the first place. And it doesn't help that the climactic scene, the pay-off as it were, is accompanied by a really loud section of Tosca played repeatedly on someone's stereo. The affect is not so much comical as discomfiting.

As a comedy, The Swindle is not terribly funny. And as a caper film it's predictable and unsatisfying. Once Huppert removes her brown wig, there's not much left on the screen worth seeing.