Un día bien aprovechado

Jean Rousseau is traveling around France with his mother in his side-car. He kills individuals in unusual ways and shows his victims a picture of a chubby young man. It turns out that the victims are the nine jury members who convicted his son to a death sentence.

It's an interesting French-Italian black comedy. I just didn't find it compelling. It needs some dialogue especially between Jean and his mother. That's the missed opportunity. It needs some back and forth. They could be bickering. They need to be funny. Some of the kills are fun. It's a really interesting idea, but it's missing the writing.

I've only seen this film once, over 10 years ago on night-time TV but it has stuck firmly in my mind ever since. It begins with quite a surreal touch, you don't really know whats going on until the last 10 minutes. It follows a psycho as he goes on a murdering spree across France, killing Garage attendents, Life Guards, Actors in the most brutal, Penelope Pitstop contrived situations, ie locking the Garage attendent in his paint-oven.

All these murders are unlinked until the final 10 minutes when we discover that they are actually members of a Jury about to condemn his son, the final scence...well, I'll leave that for you.

It's black-humour at it's best, a French genre film at it's best but still, I've never seen it available on video, if anyone knows where I can source it I will be a happy man for ever more.

What a crazy film! Writer/Director Jean-Louis Trintignant clearly enjoyed himself here. There is barely a scene that does not scream with glee at the sheer audacity and anarchic inevitability as the remarkable Jacques Dufilho utterly convinces as a man with a mission. And what a mission- to kill nine people in as imaginative ways as possible and there is method in his madness. Apart from the mad story we have the most amazing visuals and in this marvellous mix of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jacques Tati, a wondrous black comedy that constantly startles and surprises. Possibly a little stretched, always a problem for a one idea film but something very different and well worth a watch. Bruno Nicolai also most effective, especially when it creeps into the screenplay with a reference on the radio in the car of a man about to die.

Jean-Louis Trintignant steps behind the camera and writes and directs this black comedy about a man who sets out to kill the 9 jurors who sent his son to death row in the space of a single day. The deaths are all different and intricately staged, so the film is basically about watching them play out. In that regard, it's virtually a silent film. It's interesting, but I found it to be strangely uninvolving. It's like watching an intricate little machine that you have no interest in.

Or maybe influenced by THEATER OF BLOOD or THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES, in terms of scheme, topic, vengeance of a father to avenge the death of his son - himself a murderer - who was sentenced and executed by the justice after a trial. So it is a weird, offbeat, story, in the Jean Pierre Mocky's style, as f...of as will be LE MAITRE NAGEUR, a few years later, directed by the same Jean Louis Trintignant. I have been puzzled - and still am - by the meaning of both films, especially from some one like Trintignant. I would have expected something more sensitive, poignant, some kind of drama, character study, instead of this sort of joke. Yes, I am puzzled, but not deceived. This is exceptional, it announces Gustave de Kervern's world, starring Yolande Moreau and the new old version of Gerard Depardieu.