Golden to speech’s silvern, artfully employed silence can, in a word, imply a world -- even on the silver screen. In Being There, for instance, Mr. Chance’s tongue-tied gardening maxims move president, politicians and public, just as the sweetly bewildered Joe Morton character’s muteness impresses others to deep response in Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet. These are satiric, so more to the purpose is Repulsion, a simple tale in which Deneuve’s nearly wordless, sexually repressed manicurist chills to the bone, reinforced by camera peephole distortion and a final pan and then zoom in on a portrait and, even closer, the actress’ eye full-screen.

In the hands of lesser craftsmen, however, still waters run shallow, showy technique replaces subtlety and would-be depth is absent. This is the case with director and co-writer Siegrid Alnoy’s feature début, She’s One of Us/Elle est une des notre. From an irrelevant opening title out of Dostoyevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and labored female breathing, through Gabriel Scotti’s hammy low-volume score and reduced-palette elongated modern sets, to a simulated film “break,” a father (Daniel Ceccaldi) dragged in from left field to commit perjury and unexplained worshipful “angel of friendship” Sebastien (Pierre-Felix Graviere), the film bleeds Meaning. Despite, however, Alnoy’s desire to “deliver a feeling of clarity” about innocence corrupted by “a deceitful society [and about] what is most opaque within us, our darkest and most stubborn enigmas,” what is left is merely that, opacity. No clarification, no reason and, worse, no sympathy.

A big-boned thirty-five, Christine Blanc (Sasha Andres) lives alone in a Rhône-Alpes town, visits her concerned parents weekly and supports herself as a temporary replacement secretary. It seems that the solitary woman wants to be a team player professionally and socially -- “seems,” because the film never gets a handle on her, and her personal fibs are disclosed casually through others -- but while employers and co-workers praise her work habits, she remains for them (and us) an imprecise generality whose very name is recalled incorrectly. Sitting ambiguously in desk chairs, ghastly mall armchairs, or a driving-school automobile, she mentally rehearses people’s conversations about nothing while herself remaining nothing.

SPOILER ALERT

At the temp agency, Patricia Maurin (Catherine Mouchet) is having lovelife problems with her Jerome, appears open, and is invited to an overkill dinner which Chrissie adorns with the other’s favorite knickknack owls, purchased shortly before the occasion. Homosexual undertones possibly exist -- just as heterosexual ones may come into play with maddeningly elliptic police inspector Degas (Carlo Brandt) -- but, sex or not, the idyll is nipped when, the ladies in identical light olive-green, the heroine loses it at the local swimming pool and fatally attacks the prospective soul mate.

Lifeless herself, Chrissie’s surface life now begins to flower. The driving test passed at last, she is fêted by colleagues who, oblivious to her aloofness, smoke, drink, make merry and sing “she’s a jolly good fellow.” A thousand-Euro scratch-card prize drops into her lap. Mr. Danjard (Jacques Spiesser) tenders a full-time executive job with GST trucking--putting her vapid response down to excitement -- and she dispenses with pseudo-“boyfriend” Jean-Michel (Laurent Poitrenaux), immediately replaced with up-and-comer Eric (Eric Caravaca); she becomes a confident businesswoman to the point of getting office-boy Sebastien fired and Pascale Lopez (Mireille Roussel) given an obligatory leave of absence which will result in marital failure and suicide.

Her erotic shimmy in front of a TV screen is gratuitous, as are full-frontal seconds with the live-in boyfriend who, after two months, “know[s] nothing about you, you say nothing.” A puzzling getaway interlude with Sebastien and a number of gauzy dream sequences do nothing to help. There is no lust, though desire may or may not be offered with her boss or with Degas during an odd lunch date, and she turns her back on loving Eric and her parents while the police slowly connect her with the poolside crime. Stanislas Stanic and Rodolphe Conge are funny as interchangeable bumbling detectives reminiscent of Thompson and Thomson from Hergé’s Tin-Tin series but provide no more than a pleasant wakeup bump on the road downhill.

Out of a curious lakeside scene, the bovine woman walks to a police car. Nothing is said or resolved here, either. Hours pass, lights come on in town and inside the car, fog descends, she sits cryptically alone in the rear seat. Even the two policemen have deserted the scene. 

(Released by Leisure Tme Features; not rated by MPAA.)