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In Emmanuel Carrère's feature film La Moustache, based on the novel he also penned, a married man (Vincent Lindon) shaves off his mustache. His doting wife (Emmaneulle Devos) does not notice. Worse than that, she doesn't even seem to remember that her husband ever had a mustache in the first place. At a dinner party, his close friends are equally oblivious.

Marc, however, insists. He did have a mustache.

He has pictures to prove it. He has the actual hairs meticulously retrieved from the trash. Marc is so persistent about his former mustache that his wife grows irritated; irratation turns to worry, and before long, she decides to commit her spouse to a mental hospital.

We, the audience, are complicit in the knowledge that Marc did in fact have a mustache. We saw the hairy beast on his upper lip. We watched him shave it, and witnessed him clean the bath tub once he was finished. La Moustache is Marc's film and there is no reason not to trust our protagonist. The universe is playing a strange trick on him. Filmmaker Carrère weaves in and out between a quotidian storyline and a simultaneous alternate reality.

Another French filmmaker, Dominik Moll, recently used this strategy to marvelous effect in the far more daring Lemming. Here, however, the premise seems like an exercise in cleverness. There is nothing particularly endearing or engaging about the prosperous, middle-aged architect who is forced to question his reality.

His wife is impatient and shallow. And therein lies the film's greatest disappointment - rendering the captivating, enigmatic, and oddly gorgeous Emmanuelle Devos (Kings and Queen) into an unsympathetic character. For shame.