PART PARODY, PART TRIBUTE, Confidentially Yours is essentially an exploration of the director's divided feelings about the American thriller. While this dichotomy is at times interesting, for most of its two hours. Confidentially Yours is simply a thriller that does not thrill and a parody that doesn't bother to amuse you. You have to be very, very hooked on Truffaut himself to make seeing the movie worthwhile.

Jean-Louis Trintignant stars as a mild-mannered real estate agent called Vercel. When his wife's lover is murdered, he is called in to be interrogated. He returns from the police station, to find his wife sprawled on the living room floor; one neat bullet shot through her head. Vercel decides to ignore the advice of his lawyer--"The French adore love affairs...understand crimes of passion...I'll have you acquitted"--and starts out to find the killer himself. Accompanied by a secretary he had just fired, he decides to leave for Marseilles, hoping to dig up clues in the late Mme. Vercel's somewhat murky past.

He needn't have worried. In satire of the often-facile plot turns of film noir, the clues are simply handed to the characters, at intervals of about five minutes apiece. While this plot succeeds in commenting on the genre, it also robs the film of any interest it might otherwise have held.

In one scene, the secretary (Fanny Ardant) has just found a mysterious scrap of paper in a wastebasket of a hotel room Mme. Vercel once stayed in. Wandering out into a strange neighborhood, she walks a few blocks, then happens to climb a high wooden fence, behind which an announcer for a horse race happens, just at that moment, to call out the cryptic words that--surprise--happened to be scribbled on the note. This happens again and again; the movie, in fact, stops just short of producing the name of the murderer as a cerealbox prize. Consequently, Vercel and company's efforts become redundant at best. Emphatically cardboard, the characters, who constantly mouth stock lines, generally play the roles of straight men for the director.

The story itself seems designed to be incomprehensible. A convoluted mess of recurring clues, recurring thugs, and recurring murders, the plot features a murderous priest, a mystery-lady in a leopard coat, a grotesque pimp and a complete cast, shuffled and re-shuffled, of the stock characters. Throughout the film, in fact, the plot contains all the typical characteristics of film noir.

Unfortunately, the self-satire becomes very tiresome. Self-conscious but not detached, Confidentially Yours neither works as frank satire, nor does it hold the suspense of a thriller. The bizarre jumbled reality of Vercel's world has more in common with that of a Thomas Pynchon novel than with the finely-crafted artifice of the classic film noir. Pynchon, however, has wit. Sustaining little of the illusion that is vital in, for example, Scarlet Street, Confidentially Yours makes no bones of having ketchup for blood and a pacemaker for a heart. The movie actually seems to be the director's private joke--he is having his cake, and eating it, too, both at the audience's expense.

TWO GOOD THINGS about the movie are Fanny Ardant and Nestor Almendros. The latter produces some gorgeous black-and-white footage, using the backdrop of grungy Marseilles streets, sleazy nightclubs and palm-lined plazas in eternal rain to make for an atmosphere at once sinister and lyrical. The movie works better on a purely visual level than on any other; as a series of stills rather than a "moving picture." Whether one is willing to sit through two hours' worth of photos, even of southern France, is, of course, debatable.

As for Ardant, Truffaut remarked that he had been "seduced by her looks." One can see why, although she is striking in a way more reminiscent of a Helmut Newton heroine than a Hitchcock one--if only she had been given the chance to do more than look good.

While Ardant manages to be as engaging as her role allows, Trintignant is bland even beyond the dictates of his character. As Vercel, he comes across as unequivocally wimpy rather than charmingly understated, leaving the romantic subplot quite unconvincing--mildly grotesque, in fact, as the love scenes inevitably resemble unmotivated assaults.

The final shots of Confidentially Yours sum up what the movie is all about. Showing a choirful of angelic-looking children singing in a cathedral, the camera zooms in on the first row of black patent-leather shoes. We are shown a rock that is being kicked from one child to the next, back and forth, teasingly, pointlessly, as the credits flash on.