L’Emmerdeur (1973)

L’Emmerdeur is a French crime film first released in 1973, directed by Edouard Molinaro.  The film stars Lino Ventura, Jacques Brel, Caroline Cellier, Jean-Pierre Darras and Nino Castelnuovo.  It has also been released under the title: A Pain in the A....  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Professional hit man Ralf Milan takes a room in a hotel opposite the law courts in Montpellier - his mission: to assassinate a key witness in a gangland trial.  In an adjacent room, François Pignon is about to commit suicide.  Now that his wife has abandoned him for another man, he has no reason to live, so he tries to hang himself.  The attempt fails, and the result is a burst water pipe that starts to flood Milan’s room.  To keep the authorities away, Milan has no other option than to deal with Pignon himself.  Having come to regard Milan as a friend, Pignon appeals to him to help him repair his broken marriage and his broken life.  To keep his nuisance neighbour quiet, Milan can only agree, but all too soon his patience is tested to its very limit – and beyond...

The popular Belgian singer Jacques Brel stars along side Lino Ventura – the great hard man of French cinema – in this unique, totally bizarre black comedy.  The film was adapted from a popular stage play by Francis Veber and directed by Edouard Molinaro.  The same director-writer team would achieve even greater success in 1978 with the almost legendary hit La Cage aux folles.  L’Emmerdeur is a very different kind of film, eschewing farce and "obvious" comic dialogue for underplayed deadpan humour in realistic settings – with a few brilliant visual gags thrown in along the way.

The rapport between Ventura and Brel is perfect – their act resembling a surly panther whose sleep is being disturbed by a rather too playful lamb.  As the film develops, there’s a marvellous sense of growing tension, an expectation that Ventura will lose his cool at any moment and swat Brel dead with the mere flick of a wrist.  The characters are well-developed (the script is one of Veber’s best) and skilfully portrayed.  It’s impossible not to feel for either character, although our sympathies ultimately end up on the side of the beleaguered Ventura (the actor is really on top form here, showing the same unbeatable flair for black comedy that he has for straight dramatic roles).   Brel and Ventura had previously worked together on Claude Lelouch’s L’Aventure, c’est l’aventure (1972).  The character of François Pignon would appear in a number of Veber’s subsequent films, including Les Fugitifs (1986) and Le dîner de cons (1998), on each occasion played by a different actor.

As tends to happen with popular French film comedies, L’Emmerdeur was remade as an American film, Buddy Buddy (1981), directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Klaus Kinski.

© James Travers 2005

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