Une journée bien remplie ou Neuf meurtres insolites dans une même journée par un seul homme dont ce n'est pas le métier

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 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.

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.

Four comments on a movie which has fallen into oblivion in its native country; among the four -positive,quite rightly so- reviews,no one comes from Trintignant's land .

The first of the two movies the famous actor has directed (for the record,the second is "Le Maître Nageur " ) the movie belongs to the handful of works which goes off the beaten track ,a thousand miles away from the French seventies film scene.

The subject is close to that of Douglas Hickox's "theater of blood" (released the same year,coincidence)in which Denis Price and his daughter( Diana Rigg )slew all the panel of judges who had refused to give the actor the award ,imitating Shakespeare's tragedies

Shakespeare is also present in Trintignant's work ;the actor/director appears himself in a cameo :he directs "Hamlet" and delivers this excellent line" You don't make an "Hamlet" without breaking eggs" ,in French of course ,for the French language uses the same expression.

But "Une Journée Bien Remplie " is given a very different treatment,sometimes amateurish,sometimes self-conscious ,but never "politically correct" -and with his gruesome farce,it may be possible that Trintignant wanted to express his disgust for death penalty and the "right" some people have to send their fellow men to the guillotine -one must remember that death penalty was abolished by François Mitterrand in 1981- .And the "A Suivre" (= to be continued) of the final cast and credits might indicate that grandpa is ready to take over from the baker (and not for bread and croissants).

The absence of star may explain the complete commercial failure of the effort;nevertheless Jacques Dufilho is well known over here: a stage actor,he was almost always given supporting parts ( in a career which spans four decades)for his physical appearance is not what you call bankable.In the only film in which he plays the lead,he looks so much the part I do not really know who else Trintignant could have cast in the part of this deadpan cynical dispenser of justice ;dressed in black, in a black motorcycle and sidecar ,almost always silent ,in a movie which is half silent anyway.Editing is often disturbing, Trintignant often denies his audience the suspense and if he depicts the murder in the hospital in lavish details,some of them are told by the radio -and we can appreciate the brilliant superintendent 's deductive reasoning ! The director even allows himself ,when the murderer listens to the radio ,to announce :"the track you've just heard is taken from the "Une Journée Bien Remplie" movie score " ;the black humor is constant:" Five at noon! says grandpa,you're on schedule!"

Noblesse Oblige ! (kind hearts and coronets)