Le Couperet (2005) - film review

When dedicated company man Bruno Davert loses his job in a corporate reorganisation, he comes close to losing his self-respect and his family.  After two years of futile job-hunting, he hits on a brilliant scheme to win a senior post with another company.   By advertising a bogus job vacancy, he gets potential rivals in his field to send him their CVs – with personal details which enable him to find them – and kill them...

Costa-Gavras, renowned for an impressive series of political thriller-dramas in the ’70s and ’80s, makes a rare excursion into black comedy with this inspired adaptation of a popular novel by American writer Donald E. Westlake.  It’s a slick social satire with a razor sharp edge, in which the murderous antics of a psychopathic family man take on a disturbing banality when set in the context of the harsh dog-eat-dog world of soulless, profit-obsessed corporations.

Easily Costa-Gavras’s most enjoyable and socially relevant film for well over a decade, Le Couperet is every bit as compelling as Westlake’s novel, skilfully combining Hitchcockian suspense, human interest drama and some great, side-splitting comedy.  The characters are well-drawn and well-played, the plot ingenious and satisfying, whilst the underlying social themes are apparent without being over-laboured.  It’s meaty, thought-provoking and fun.  You’d expect nothing less of one of French cinema’s most admired film directors.

The star of the film is José Garcia, a popular actor who - unfortunately – is still very much associated with low-brow crowd-pulling comedies, in spite of the fact that his talents clearly out-class such mediocre fare.   In what is almost certainly his best screen performance to date, Garcia brings a dark intensity and realism to his portrayal that makes his character genuinely disturbing and yet also thoroughly likeable.  You want him to succeed so that he can win back his self-esteem and save his family – even if this means literally butchering his rivals.  What does this say about the kind of world we now live in, where in order to survive, we must eliminate the opposition?  What will you do – when the axe falls?  A spot of D.I.Y. head-hunting, perhaps?

© James Travers 2008

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