One of a mounting number of brilliant young French directors currently emerging on the international scene, Arnaud Desplechin didn't get much attention in this country until his fourth film, 1996's My Sex Life…Or How I Got Into An Argument, a virtuoso three-hour ode to the romantic entanglements of overeducated, disaffected twentysomethings. Its strong reception has prompted the re-release of 1992's La Sentinelle, an intriguing and assured throwback to such paranoid post-Watergate American thrillers as The Conversation and The Parallax View, in which the lead character's private investigation winds up revealing just how much trouble he's in. Beginning, significantly, during the waning days of the Soviet Union, the film stars Emmanuel Salinger as a lonely student of forensic pathology who discovers a shrunken, mummified human head stowed in his suitcase. Obsessed with its origins, he conducts tests to figure out its identity for proper burial, and the closer he comes, the more outside forces begin to threaten his life. La Sentinelle could hardly be described as taut, but Desplechin's languorous pacing well suits his alarm over the casual, insidious execution of power after the Cold War. But apart from devising a somewhat convoluted thriller, he also provides a fuller portrait of Salinger's troubled social life; his isolation from his peers goes a long way in explaining his peculiar attachment to the shrunken head. While La Sentinelle doesn't end with a conventionally satisfying payoff, Desplechin's thoughtful and meticulously detailed direction offers many other rewards.