They are quick reads and often of dubious quality. This film adaptation by Guillaume Nicloux is, however, a different matter. Since Angernau is her home town, she wants to leave it as soon as possible to avoid old acquaintances, but Gabriel stumbles on intriguing events concerning the cargo of a ship in port.
Puzzled characters pop in at frame left for no apparent reason, but somehow add to the sequence.
The taxi driver wears a hearing aid that is always on the blink. Flies are always buzzing around the head of one of the baddies. Cut-frame editing produces a hallucinatory effect as Gabriel snoops in the room of a suspect. Gabriel scans a newspaper in the back of a taxi, then throws it on the rear window ledge. The camera follows, checks out what he was reading, and then the front page rips off, flies out the window and settles on the street.