“Gold Brick” is a twisty French heist picture that leans on the “cute.”

It’s a “Get even with the rich” scheme that involves pilfering perfume from France’s Chartres-centered “Cosmetics Valley” distribution chain. It’s more of a “How to” heist picture than a caper comedy.

But this short, not-quite-brisk film’s real shortcoming is that writer-director Jérémie Rozan makes it all about the MO and the VO — “how they’re doing it,” and having his hero explain how, ad nauseum, start-to-finish, in voice-over narration.

We don’t get to figure things out from visuals, situations and dialogue. Noooo. It must be spoon-fed, explained endlessly, with the odd quip or aphorism to make the thief Daniel Sauveur (Raphaël Quenard) sound like a wit.

“Don’t forget, the worst rich person is the one who used to be poor,” he narrates (in French with subtitles, or dubbed). “Like they say in Japan, ‘Rain falls harder on a leaking roof.'”

That oer-explaining is a pity because one thing the script tries to get right is that thieves aren’t generally the smartest guys in the room.

Daniel grew up working class in Chartres, world famous for its cathedral. But even the family home’s view of that stone pile of magnificence is ruined by a billboard for Breuills & Fils (and son) trucking. In Chartres, “The Breuills always win.”

Daniel and his pal-named-for-the-truck-company Scania (Igor Gotesman) fight to not end up working for the Breuils, to no avail. They “own this town.” But once on the payroll, Daniel is the one who figures out all this trendy perfume they’re shipping comes in boxes. The company inventories the boxes, not the number of bottles in them.

A scam is born. But being lummoxes, they sell online, or to street stall vendors. They throw money around. Daniel is stupid enough to wear a Rolex to work, which his crooked foreman (Stéphan Wojtowicz) takes from him. They’re barely clever enough to stay one step up on that shakedown artist and the out-of-his-depth heir who runs this place (Antoine Guoy), much less the cops.

Daniel even blurts out details of his “start-up” to the out-of-his-league blonde (Agathe Rousselle) he hits on at the tony night club. Turns out, she’s new at Breuill’s, in HR. His scheme almost unravels before it really gets going.

The film tracks that pilfering as it progresses from stealing little and thinking small to stealing big and playing all the angles. And every step of the way, Daniel has to thief-splain every damned thing he does, including alternate versions of the way this all will play out.

It’s more engrossing than engaging, as one consequence of over-reliance on voice-over is that it distances the viewer from the protagonist. Even in films where it works — “Goodfellas” comes to mind — we are more observers than participants in what’s going on thanks to the remove having a character talk directly to the viewer adds to the narrative.

The path through the plot here is fascinating, but low-stakes all the way. We never fear for our “heroes,” or connect with them.

And voice-over becomes not just the writer-director’s crutch, but the actor’s. We get less out of Quenard’s performance than we should because his endless explanations leave little that needs to be gotten across by the acting. And when he’s a little less interesting to watch, so if everybody around him.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex

Cast: Raphaël Quenard, Igor Gotesman, Agathe Rousselle, Stéphan Wojtowicz, Youssef Hajdi and Antoine Guoy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jérémie Rozan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35