The North Star

Édouard Binet is a Frenchman who has drifted for years in North Africa without settling anywhere. On the boat to Belgium he meets Sylvie Baron and introduces her to a wealthy Egyptian passenger carrying valuable jewellery. The two of them grow close and Édouard is unsettled by it. A few days later Édouard arrives at the boarding house run by Sylvie's mother with bloodstains on his clothes. The Egyptian passenger has been killed on a train. The source is a novel by Georges Simenon. Pierre Granier-Deferre's film is not interested in solving the murder but in what the three people in the boarding house do to one another. Sylvie suspects him; her mother Louise begins to protect him, and why she protects him is the real subject. Simone Signoret and Philippe Noiret face each other, and neither gives a performance that tries to hide getting older. The telling is slow, the weather overcast, the space narrow; it is the most familiar tone of the Simenon adaptations.