I first watched this as a twelve-year-old in the original French language in 1994. I'm a francophone from Montréal, Québec, where this movie is set. I remember enjoying it as much as any successful American comedy of the time; the two main characters are fun and likeable, and the nighttime atmosphere is very special. A recent re-watch convinced me to write this review since the experience was just as pleasurable as the first, but something hit different because of the ever present AI technology in our day and age.
"L'Assassin jouait du trombone" tells the story of Augustin Marleau, a failed actor who now works as a night watchman at Popcorn International movie studios. His teenage daughter Josée joins him one week-end, and the pair soon witnesses strange things when four of the studios' founders are killed, one by one. Marleau is being framed for these murders, as personal items are left on the corpses, and one body even ends up in his car. Josée, a bright budding programmer who reads detective novels, understands the killer's strategy and helps her father through this odd and often comical ordeal.
One of the story's most intriguing elements is the "totalitarian computer" system (Marleau's words) used by the studios; the computer records every phone conversation and prints it; Josée notices camera lenses above each computer station, and every hour, a Siri-like voice tells the time of day before reading an AI-generated poem. Marleau's colleague Tremblay once asks the fifth founder, the man who built Popcorn International's cutting-edge technologies, if these machines will replace us one day. It all sounded like wild science fiction when this movie was released in 1991, but the extreme and dangerous possibilities of AI are frequently discussed nowadays. I won't say more to avoid spoilers.
Every actor in this movie gives an excellent performance, including fifteen-year-old Anaïs Goulet-Robitaille who didn't pursue acting as an adult but was active in Québec's film and television industry at the time. Milan Kymlicka's music is brilliant and adds a lot to the ensemble. The funniest parts of this movie often have to do with Québec's unique use of the French language, so the best dialogue would be lost in translation in a dubbed version. I took away two stars, as some scenes and characters are very caricatural in nature, but this movie is definitely worth watching. 8/10.
