An unsmiling Gérard Depardieu is the foil for the straight-faced innocence of Pierre Richard: in La Chèvre they are a kind of French Laurel and Hardy malgr?eux. Richard starred in The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (October 7), which Le Chèvre writer-director Veber co-wrote. If in that film his very normality amisdt the maelstrom made him comic, here he is both the storm and its eye, an individual who is naturally and unfailingly accident prone. When an industrialist's daughter, who also suffrs from congenital bad luck (in French slang, a "goat"), disappears from her Mexican vacation, le schlemiel is hired to track her down on the theory that he is sure to "slip on the same banana peel" and lead the way to her. Seasoned detective Depardieu is not amused, though amazed. What we wait for is what he fears, that bad luck is contagious.