A man drives his car along a country road in France, only to find a large crane with a huge claw attached blocking his path. The landscape is too swampy to go around it, so they he is forced to wait for the vehicle to get out of the way, which it doesn’t do, it reaches over and picks up his car then swings it through the air as he panics and yells to the operator to stop – what has he ever done to him? A hint is provided when he catches sight of a photograph of a young boy in the window of the cab: but before he has time to do anything about it, the crane has dropped him from a great height and started to shred him inside the car. Who is this man who has committed this murder, and will he strike again?
You could say that, in this very strange black comedy from actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. Much of the time when actors turn to directing, if they have attained any level of celebrity beforehand that is, they tend to opt for something of the prestigious and high-falutin’, a project that will reflect well on their intellectual capabilities, a nice Shakespeare adaptation or a work that highlights some obscure matter of interest to a small audience. In the case of Trintignant, he threw all that back in the culture vultures’ faces and though there was a connection to the Bard of Avon, he was more intent in affronting good taste by seeing how far we would watch a man who is systematically making his way down a list of victims.
He has a reason for this, though whether you think it’s a good reason was very much a matter of opinion rather than law, as his actions were assuredly against that, but the plot didn’t have a tremendous amount of dialogue – it’s a good way into the film before the killer, Jean Rousseau (Jacques Dufilho), actually speaks – which left the motives to be pieced together from snippets of flashbacks and the conjecture on the radio news reports the characters spend a lot of time listening to. After a while we understand he is murdering the jury members who sent his son to the gallows, providing his own twisted notion of justice as if blinded to rational thought by his grief, not that he ever looks too upset.
Indeed, he is so dead set on completing his task that it’s only in the parts where it doesn’t go entirely to plan that he becomes animated, be that an instance of getting the wrong lookalike brother on one of his missions, or a car chase with the police that springs the film into life from its previously deliberate, matter of fact pacing. Rousseau has given himself a whole day to see to it that the executions are completed, so meticulous in his preparations that every stop along the way to commit his crimes are noted down with the utmost exactitude in a notebook; the darkly comic aspect comes when he is so much more efficient than anyone else, suggesting all you need is the correct amount of scheming and even with other factors threatening your routine, with a bit of imagination you will succeed.
Well, that and a lot of grim determination, which the rough and tough-looking yet immaculately-dressed Rousseau has in spades. After a while you’ll be questioning yourself, do you want to watch this man attain his goal simply because it is a lot neater and dramatically satisfying to witness a job well done, or are you somehow morally bankrupt for wishing nine people dead because of that? Granted, they were fictional characters, but the need for resolution in a narrative compels us to keep with the anti-hero since it is from his perspective we are viewing the plot, not necessarily because we like watching characters be murdered. Yet the sick purity of such a set-up isn’t lost on Trintignant, who begins to play surreal games with us, adding his own voice to a bit where the camera loses Rousseau on the road, or having the radio presenter announce Bruno Nicolai’s incredibly catchy score as the themes from the film you are watching, specifically the murder to come in mere minutes. One of those films it’s best to stumble across knowing little about it for the full effect.
Aka: Une journée bien remplie ou Neuf meurtres insolites dans une même journée par un seul homme dont ce n'est pas le métier
