Deux heures à tuer (1966)
Directed by Ivan Govar

Film Review

Ivan Govar was just thirty years old when he finally brought down the curtain on his directing career with this quirky minimalist thriller, having spent a decade being shunned by audiences and derided by the critics.  As in Walter Forde's The Ghost Train (1941), a classic British comedy it bears an uncanny resemblance to, Deux heures à tuer takes place approximately in real time, within the limiting confines of an ordinary provincial railway station one dark and ominous evening.  It lacks the supernatural element of Forde's film (which was based on an earlier stage play by Dad's Army star Arnold Ridley) and is instead a more conventional murder mystery, although Govar and his screenwriter Bernard Dimey have far more fun with the odd assortment of characters than they do with the flimsy whodunit plot, which is little more than a lazily tossed about McGuffin.

Lacking the resources to make the kind of film he had intended - a solid film noir thriller - Govar ended up delivering a weirdly likeable comedy whose enjoyment value lies mainly in the obvious clash of egos between the two stars - Pierre Brasseur and Michel Simon, both sadly near the end of their respective careers.  Here, the two actors are admirably well-suited for the kind of roles they excelled in during their later years - suspicious-looking social misfits who carry menace in just about every line on their faces, and with eyes positively aglow with mischief.  It is the spiteful cat-and-mouse game that Brasseur and Simon are engaged in that provides most of the substance and interest value of the film - the secondary intrigue involving Catherine Sauvage, Jean-Roger Caussimon and Raymond Rouleau is a mere yawn-inducing sideshow.

Deux heures à tuer may look as if it was made on a shoestring budget but it is visually striking and possesses a very distinctive oppressive aura, one that can be felt in many of Govar's other films.  The confined setting, the small cast of characters, the bizarre manhunt going on in the background, and the most incongruously jaunty score you can imagine - all this creates a mood of tension and anticipation which sadly isn't satisfactorily paid off in the film's hurried and all-too-tidy ending.  The killer turns out to be who we knew it was all along and the dull secondary characters continue their journey as if nothing has happened (which, for them, is sadly the case).  Yet again, the critics gave Govar a hard time and when the audiences once more failed to turn up for his film, the director decided it was time to give up and start doing something else.  Now he is all but forgotten, except by those who are unable to resist the idiosyncratic charms of his likeably off-kilter films, which include Que personne ne sorte (1962) and Un soir, par hasard (1963).

Film Synopsis

For the past two months, a serial killer has been at large in the inconsequential little French town of Auvemaux.  So far the fiend has murdered three women, and on each occasion he takes with him one of the shoes of his unfortunate victim.  One evening, a disparate group of people find themselves stranded at the town's railway station, having missed the nine o'clock train.  They have two hours to wait until the next train to Paris - two hours to kill!  A suspicious looking individual with a beard takes an interest in the Damervilles, a seemingly ordinary middle class married couple, whilst another man, De Rock, lingers in the background, clearly waiting for something to happen.  The bearded man, Laurent, allows Madame Damerville to think he is a detective on the trail of the killer and listens with interest as she attempts to incriminate her husband.  Laurent's attention seems to be focused on the station's ugly left-luggage attendant - if he has nothing to hide why does he become so aggressive when Laurent reveals his suspicions about him being the killer?  No one seems to be quite what he or she seems - and who is the mysterious young woman who haunts the station like a lost soul - a passenger, an avenging angel or the killer's next victim?  Two hours is a long time to wait when there is murder in the air...